Exploring syntactic variation by means of “Language Production Experiments”: Methods from and analyses on German in Austria

Abstract This article presents computer supported “language production experiments” (LPEs) as a method for the investigation of syntactic variation. It describes the setup for the investigation of numerous syntactic phenomena and provides a sample study of the German GET passive across Austria. It also suggests that LPEs offer possibilities for the targeted investigation of linguistic variation in various ways. They may be used to explore speakers’ individual linguistic repertoires and an according corpus setup can be used to examine e.g., interspeaker patterns of variation. LPEs also enable researchers to investigate which linguistic factors control or influence syntactic variation.