"Look, who we once were". Closeness and distance to dialect on poetic grave inscriptions of the Baroque period betwenn Danube and the Bohemian Forest
2012
Abstract
Based on a corpus of anonymous rhymed grave inscriptions of the 17th and 18th century from northern Lower Bavaria, this paper looks into the regional diachronic use of dialect and standard language in lyrical texts. It attempts to answer the question (1) to which extent the regionally socialized poets were aware of a discrepancy between oral and written language use and clearly distinguished in this respect and (2) to which extent dialect and standard language competed or supplemented and overlapped each other offering a spectrum of variants the poets could use (according to the requirement of the poetic object to be represented) forming their language more or less closely connected to dialect.