German universal concessive conditionals with wh-clause-initial and wh-clause-medial marking

<p>These are the data analysed in Chapter 6 of Vander Haegen's dissertation entitled "Konstruktionsgrammatik und Variation. Eine Mikrotypologie universaler Irrelevanzgefüge im Gegenwartsdeutschen".</p>
<p>The dataset includes an annotated sample of N = 3000 German written universal concessive conditionals (e.g. "Was immer auch passiert, ich bin für dich da!" 'Whatever happens, I will be there for you!') from the German Reference Corpus DeReKo. Concessive conditionals (CCs) can basically be defined as conditionals with quantification, as they express a (usually exhaustive) set of antecedent values in the protasis, instead of only one antecedent value as in prototypical conditionals. In universal concessive conditionals (UCCs), the antecedent set is evoked through a combination of a free-choice-expression (here: the complex particle "immer auch" '-ever') and a variable in the guise of a wh word (here: "was" 'what').</p>
<p>German UCCs can either be marked wh-clause-medially (using the particles "auch" and/or "immer" as above – both mean '-ever') or wh-clause-initially (with an expression of irrelevance like "egal" 'no matter', "gleichgültig" 'no matter', "wurscht' 'no matter (lit.: sausage) etc.). The wh-clause-initial and -medial marking strategies are in near-complementary distribution.</p>
<p>The dataset was compiled in the context of a doctoral dissertation project which sought to, inter alia, determine functional and formal differences (apart from the position and lexical specification of the free-choice marking) between wh-clause-initially and -medially marked UCCs in contemporary German. It comprises n = 1500 tokens of wh-clause-initially and n = 1500 tokens of wh-clause-medially marked UCCs. The data are annotated for over 20 formal and functional variables.</p>
<p>The full dataset (including the corpus data) and a dataset including only ID numbers and annotations (to facilitate processing with statistical software) are shared in two separate .csv-files. An R Markdown file with the data analysis and an html file with the R code and output are shared as well.<p>