Syntactic variation and interactional coherence in online communication: The German conjunction “weil” in written interactions

Abstract The current study presents an analysis of a linguistic device supporting interactional coherence in computer-mediated communication (CMC). focused on the use German causative conjunction weil and, more specifically, syntactic variation verb-final versus verb-second word order -clause. Verb-final indicates dependent clause, whereas independent clause. While only former is accepted written Standard German, latter well documented oral communication. Relying freely available Facebook, WhatsApp, and Wikipedia corpus data, shows that both grammatical constructions are used CMC. In specific usage across discrete messages, -clause can serve to unambiguously identify its reference -clauses be refer previous messages by interlocutor oneself, predominantly relate own message. Thus, for disambiguating references interactions.