“Am besten, du gehst.” Zur nähesprachlichen Verwendung des am-Superlativs im Vor-Vorfeld

This paper investigates the use of the German am-superlative in colloquial utterances such as am besten, du gehst jetzt. In a first approximation, this construction can be described as elliptically used am-superlative occurring on the left sentence periphery within an Operator-Skopus-Struktur (Barden/Elstermann/Fiehler 2001). As will be shown in the empirical core part of the study, a qualitative-quantitative analysis, the pattern appears to be characterized by different overlapping and interplaying tendencies in language use (e.g. the selection and frequency of pronouns and sentence mood). The data used for the qualitative-quantitative analysis is taken mainly from a large-scale web corpus (deTenTen13).