Polysemie und morphosyntaktische Variation

This paper studies perfect auxiliary selection of the verb ›to stand‹ in 17 and 18 century corpora as well as in dialect and newspaper corpora of contemporary German. Being restricted to the auxiliary ›have‹ in central and northern German varieties, stative verbs denoting the maintenance of a physical body’s position such as are well known to allow both ›have‹ and ›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 in the 17 century. Over the course of the 18 century, usages increased at the expense of Strikingly, only central-eastern varieties tended to prefer over all periods under scrutiny. In addition to region, the polysemy of the verb contributed to the choice of the auxiliary in that non-literal or idiomatic usages tended to prefer