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Markus Schiegg: Der flexible Schreiber in der Sprachgeschichte. Grammatische Variation in süddeutschen Patientenbriefen des 19. Jahrhunderts 

This contribution applies MACHAS (1991) concept of the “flexible speaker” to a text genre that has remained unknown and hitherto has been unused: unforwarded letters and autobiographical texts from 19th century patients in psychiatric hospitals. Using a newly developed corpus of 212 texts (circa 165,000 words) from eight individuals, it will be demonstrated that even writers of the most common origin can flexibly choose their linguistic variety. In addition, these decisions can even be partially commented upon metalinguistically. By quantitatively comparing stigmaticized syntactic phenomena as well as regional and local dialect verb morphology, it becomes clear that the language use of writers with a similar socio-cultural background display clear divergences. Illness and/or age can lead to linguistic changes and either limit or prevent the deliberate choice of varieties.