Polysemie und morphosyntaktische Variation

Abstract This paper studies perfect auxiliary selection of the verb stehen ›to stand‹ in 17th and 18th century corpora as well as in dialect and newspaper corpora of contemporary German. Being restricted to the auxiliary haben ›have‹ in central and northern German varieties, stative verbs denoting the maintenance of a physical body’s position such as stehen are well known to allow both haben ›have‹ and sein ›be‹ in southern German varieties. Our study reveals that this variability was even more widespread in historical stages of German. We witness a preponderance of sein in the 17th century. Over the course of the 18th century, haben usages increased at the expense of sein. Strikingly, only central-eastern varieties tended to prefer haben over all periods under scrutiny. In addition to region, the polysemy of the verb stehen contributed to the choice of the auxiliary in that non-literal or idiomatic usages tended to prefer haben.