A socio-linguistic analysis of the German alternation between 'bis an' and 'bis zu' constructions

Linguistic variation characterizes German constructions with a prepositional group introduced by the preposition 'bis' (‘until’, ‘up to’, ‘as long as’) followed by a second preposition [bis + PREP2], like in (1) Er begleitete mich bis zur Gartentür (‘He accompanied me to the garden gate’); (2) Er begleitete mich bis an die Gartentür (‘He accompanied me up to the garden gate’). The selection of the second preposition reflects diversity in construal: The use of 'zu' (‘to’) highlights the endpoint (of an implied path or trajectory); with 'an' (‘up to’) it is the path towards the gate which is focussed upon. This static/dynamic difference is also reflected in the case marking at the morpho-syntactic level: The preposition zu requires a dative case, whereas an – which as a ‘two-way preposition’ (Smith 1995) can alternate between the dative or the accusative (see Leys 1989 and 1995) - will require an accusative in these constructions for the explicit focusing on the whole stretch of the path, leading to its end. It is the lexical frame of the noun used after [bis + PREP2] that presupposes a built-in scale determining the choice of [PREP2]. Examples from the two German corpora DWDS and Cosmas II (IDS Mannheim) seem to confirm a first intuition that the preposition 'zu' is preferred when the noun has a more abstract meaning, e.g. (3) Er begleitete mich bis zum Sieg ('He accompanied me up to victory/until I won'); (4) …ein weiter Weg bis zum Verbot dieser Munition (Cosmas II) ('… a long way up to the prohibition of this ammunition'). But often the lexical frame for the decision of whether to use 'bis an' or 'bis zu' cannot be limited to the noun accompanying the prepositional group and it is only when considering the collexemes in a larger context that the conceptual and meaning differences become clear, as illustrated by the following example: (5) Die…Detektivin…verfolgte beide bis zu einem Hause in der Neanderstraße. - Sie benachrichtigte nun die Polizei,… (DWDS corpus);‘The…detective…tracked both up to a house in the Neanderstreet. - Then she informed the police,…' The collexeme 'nun' in the second sentence stresses the goal attainment. But does the interpretation of the linguistic variation as presented in (1) and (2) reflect expert analysis or does it correspond to folk perception as well? A quick inquiry allows to conclude that the differentiated interpretation between (1) and (2) is hardly perceived by German non-highly educated natives. Starting from examples from the two German written corpora DWDS and IDS and the German learners' corpus Falko the study will aim at finding out how strongly the differences between 'bis an'- and 'bis zu'-schemas are entrenched in different speaker groups: highly educated German natives as opposed to non-highly educated German adults, also compared with 8-10 year old pupils for the interpretation of schemas in development and with foreign learners of German for the analysis of schemas in acquisition