Emerging into your family of constructions

Starting from the term “family of constructions”, the present article investigates lexical and syntactic variation in a subtype of German concessive conditionals which is marked by was (‘what’) in combination with expressions of irrelevance like egal (‘no matter’). 12,894 examples from the DeReKo corpus (Deutsches Referenzkorpus) are analysed manually for seven variables. Both the quantitative and the qualitative results suggest that combinations of was with an expression of irrelevance, or “[IRR was]” for short, form part of a recently entrenched constructional schema [IRR w-] of concessive-conditional subordinators which are emerging into the family of concessive-conditional constructions in present-day German.