274 Raphael BertheleFrom the romantic point of view, the dialect is the expressive, emotional
variety (bloomy, beautiful), it represents intimacy and familiarity (homey,
calm, warm-hearted), and it relates to the geographic and social space of
proximity with a strongly expressed local identity (self-contained). Di-
alects, by definition languages with strong local cultural roots, are acquired
and not learnt – in opposition to the Standard whose system has to be con-
structed through hard work, e.g. in school – but passed on as a heritage or
home. The standard, on the other hand, from a romantic point of view, is
artificial, impersonal (cf. Table 2) and optimized for speed (fast).
As already discussed above, the rationalist view on the standard lan-
guage corresponds perfectly well with many attributes found in our data,
such as the uniformity/standardness of the rule-governed, real language
and its regularity. Other attributes that match the model proposed by Gee-
raerts perfectly well are those which convey the notions of effectiveness
and speed (clear, fast, verbose) and the domain-generality (non-personal).
Thus, the rationalist stance is represented in our data by a number of
attributes that characterize the standard language as a regular, complex,
efficient and logical construction as opposed to the “random” or “undomes-
ticated” dialect. The relative consistency of these attributions can also be
highlighted by the fact that hardly any property is attributed to both varie-
ties by our participants: Only 4 types out of a total of 68 for these two va-
rieties appear for both the Bern dialect and the standard language (clear,
angled, chiseled, clumsy).
The overall picture that emerges from the analysis of the mapping and
attribution task can be summarized as follows: There is support for both of
the models that Geeraerts (2003) proposed. The two most often described
varieties, one a standard language, one the Alemannic dialect of the capital
of Switzerland, clearly tie in with the Rationalist and the Romantic view of
standardization. The data make it very clear that, just as Geeraerts (2003)
has pointed out, participants do not choose either to apply the Romantic or
the Rationalist model to all languages or to language in general. What we
find is that the two models – together – form a complex model in the sense
of Lakoff’s cluster models (cf. Lakoff 1987: 74). The cluster model con-
tains a rationalist and a romantic sub-model (cf. fig. 2). Both of those sub-
models selectively apply to the prototypical dialect and to the prototypical
standard language.
It is important to note that, at least in my view, these models are by no
means static and brassbound ways of construing languages and varieties.
They have to be understood as dynamic entities of situated cognition, pro-