Grammatical arealisms across the Danish-German border from a constructional perspective

German and Danish share a long, complex, and multifaceted history of language
contact. Besides other contact scenarios, societal as well as widespread individual
multilingualism has characterised the linguistic situation in the territory of the
former Duchy of Schleswig (i.e. the northern part of the federal state of
Schleswig-Holstein in Germany as well as the southernmost part of Jutland in Denmark) from
the Early Middle Ages until the present day. In structural terms, this contact
scenario has resulted in a range of areal features that are shared by a number of Danish
and German varieties spoken in the border region, while diverging markedly from
other varieties of at least one of the languages. The aim of the present article is
twofold. Firstly, it discusses selected grammatical arealisms found in dialectal and
regiolectal varieties within the Danish-German contact zone (e.g. a shall future,
the use of and words as infinitive markers in German varieties, and possessive
linking pronouns in Danish dialects). Secondly, it attempts to demonstrate that
such arealisms can be interpreted and, to some extent, explained within the
framework of Diasystematic Construction Grammar (DCxG), a usage-based
constructionist approach to language contact situations that is centred around the idea of
language-unspecific constructions used in multilingual communities. Even though
present-day speaker communities in the contact zone might not be equally
bilingual as, say, their predecessors in the early 19th century, it is argued that the
reconstruction of common constructions can help to better understand contact-related
developments that led to the emergence of linguistic areality in the past.