Since August 2021, the research unit Linguistics collaborates with the SFB German in Austria. Variation – Contact – Perception on lexical variation, focussing selected lexical phenomena of the written standard language in Austria. The collaboration project makes use of data from the Austrian Media Corpus (amc), providing access to the Austrian print media of the past two decades.

The joint pilot project pursues multiple goals. On the one hand it serves as use case to further push the development of CorpSum´s analyses and visualization features. CorpSum, a web application, provides user-friendly, dynamically generated corpus requests incorporating extra-linguistic dimensions such as, e.g., space and time.

On the other hand the project advances lexical analyses by developing and applying methods of natural language processing. Amongst other, this will allow for model-based assumptions on the semantic development of lexemes over time, exceeding conventional corpus-linguistic analyses. This is realized in close cooperation with Andreas Baumann, Assistant professor for Digital Linguistics, Department of German Studies, University of Vienna, as well as the research unit DH Research & Infrastructure.

In addition, the collaboration project will produce various analyses on the linguistic dynamics of the German language in Austria, incorporating both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. This includes, e.g., to contrast present day’s linguistic data with (rather) historic data, such as from the WBÖ Project Cluster, the German Word Atlas (Deutscher Wortatlas) or the Austrian Newspaper Online (ANNO).