Doubts about linguictic correctness occur on all levels of language. They occur because native as well as non-native, young as well as adult speakers sometimes find themselves in situations where they feel insecure about the correct way to say or spell something. From a traditional point of view, doubtful correctness belongs to the twilight zone between grammatical and non-grammatical utterances.

Doubtful cases of linguistic correctness strongly influence public as well as individual linguistic awareness. Although such cases have been discussed again and again in popular books or newspaper articles, they have only gained marginal interest on the part of linguistics. In particular, there is no advanced research treating doubtful correctness as such, considering the subject as a possibly homogenous area within a given language.

In view of the importance of doubtful correctness cases for speakers' linguistic awareness, the amount of elaborated linguistic research dealing with the subject is very small. However, this issue of Linguistik online will try to make amends by treating them in detail. Approaches may be theoretical or empirical, and they are welcome to take into account - and perhaps even try to improve - the often rather complicated relationship between public linguistic awareness and linguistics.

There is therefore a broad range of possible topics:

• How can one identify cases of doubtful correctness in a methodologically satisfying way?
• Why does doubtful correctness exist at all?
• How can the relation between correctness problems and various other levels of language description like orthography, phonetics, morphology, syntax, semantics, or pragmatics be described?
• Are there typical stumbling blocks turning the choice of the correct form into a problem ?
• Are there new or actual problems of this kind in contrast to older ones, which have been solved? Are there any historical examples, maybe even in dead languages? How do such problems arise, i.e. how do they present themselves in a diachronic view?
• Have problematic cases of linguistic correctness been treated in the traditional linguistics of a given language? Are there any contemporary linguistic texts dealing with them?
• In some countries, there are institutions and publications giving advice in language use (like the Académie française in France or, to some extent, the Institut für deutsche Sprache in Germany). How should they treat such cases?

There will be a workshop dealing with these problems at the annual conference of the DGfS in Munic. For further information, click here.

Editor of this issue: Wolf Peter Klein