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This article presents computer supported “language production experiments” (LPEs) as a method for the investigation of syntactic variation. It describes the setup for the investigation of numerous syntactic phenomena and provides a sample study of the German GET passive across Austria. It also suggests that LPEs offer possibilities for the targeted investigation of linguistic variation in various ways. They may be used to explore speakers’ individual linguistic repertoires and an according corpus setup can be used to examine e.g., interspeaker patterns of variation. LPEs also enable researchers to investigate which linguistic factors control or influence syntactic variation.

This contribution focusses on grammatical peculiarities of German and Luxembourgish connected with the verb geben 'to give'. It addresses the grammaticalization processes which have been resulted in the existential construction es gibt 'there is', the geben-copula, and the passive and conditional auxiliary uses of geben. The paper sets out to collect and pull together scattered research findings which address individual aspects of the phenomena, and further, to document the large number of unresolved issues surrounding the grammatical affinity of geben. Selecting from the latter the question of the historical relationship between the grammaticalized geben-variants, this contribution first reviews the hypotheses extant in the research literature before testing these against the inter-and intrasystemic variation found in German regional varieties (dialects and regional varieties).

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To date, there has been limited empirical research on complementizer agreement (CA). We investigate CA drawing on a corpus of 144 speakers from 13 locations across Austria that was elicited through computer supported language production experiments and recorded in conversations. We investigate the linguistic factors that govern the occurrence of CA, as well as its areal distribution. We further explore the role of CA in speakers’ linguistic repertoires. The study finds discovers that the (non-) occurrence of CA is strongly dependent on the structure of its hosting C-elements and finds regional patterns. It also identifies CA as a phenomenon which speakers place in a non-standard register. We use the collected data to test a theory of the emergence of CA from clitic pronouns for Bavarian varieties of German.