Substitute infinitives and Oberfeld placement of auxiliaries in German subordinate clauses: A synchronic and diachronic corpus study using the CLARIN research infrastructure

• Diachronic and synchronic corpus study of Oberfeld position in German.
• In contemporary German, the Oberfeld position of werden is restricted to modal verbs.
• Gradual diachronic change from Oberfeld werden to clause-final position for non-modal verbs.
• Zwischenstellung in the verbal complex is attested from 1610 to 2000.
• Zwischenstellung is neither archaic, nor restricted to regional varieties of German.

The historical development and the linguistic triggering environments for Oberfeld formation in German subordinate clauses represent long-standing research questions in Germanic Linguistics, dating at least as far back as Jacob Grimm's famous Deutsche Grammatik. The present corpus study traces this historical development back to the 17th century. The study is based on three text corpora. For contemporary German, two syntactically annotated newspaper corpora were consulted: the TüBa-D/Z and TüPP-D/Z treebanks, 1 which provide linguistic annotations for articles published in the daily newspaper die tageszeitung (taz). For diachronic data, the corpus collection Deutsches Textarchiv (DTA)2 was utilized. The DTA contains texts ranging from 1610 to 1900. All three corpus collections are part of the Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure (CLARIN) initiative3 and will be developed further as part of the CLARIN research infrastructure. The study demonstrates the added value that annotated corpora can provide for in-depth studies in historical syntax. At the same time it showcases the added value of interoperable language resources for linguistic investigations that require access to and analysis of multiple linguistic resources.