Raśl Sanchez Prieto
University of Salamanca, Spain

Describing dominant and non-dominant varieties from a text grammatical point of view.  
Two case studies: German German vs. Austrian German and Dutch Dutch vs. Belgian Dutch hotel reviews.

Keywords: German, Dutch, text, grammar

Although the theoretical framework for describing dominant and non-dominant varieties of pluricentric languages is a very extensive one, text grammar has not been taken into consideration so far as a descriptive method within the paradigm of pluricentricity. I will explore in this contribution if the different varieties of two Germanic pluricentric languages, German and Dutch, have developed different text grammar conventions in a particular, culturally and economically very significant text (sub)genre: online customer reviews of products and goods.

Two different national cultural and economic areas (Germany-Austria, the Netherlands and Belgium) may have lead to the emergence of distinct text conventions concerning text grammatical structures.

A  corpus-based survey will be carried out in order to determine if there are significant differences among German and Austrian (as well as among Dutch and Flemish) hotel reviewers concerning the following text-grammatical devices that create grammatical (and lexical) cohesion in the analysed text genre:

- reference (cohesion by reference and substitution)

- reiteration and collocation (lexical cohesion)

- syntactic recurrence and partial morphological recurrence (morphosyntactic cohesion)

This study will be conducted within the Research and Development project \"Comments 2.0\"  funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness.