Ausgangsworts

Ausgangsworts is a term used in linguistics and digital humanities to denote the words that begin sentences or clauses in a text. The concept is used to study discourse structure, narrative flow, and stylistic choices across authors, genres, and languages.

The term is German in origin, combining Ausgang (outset, origin) and Wort (word). It is not a standard entry in major dictionaries; rather, it appears in corpus studies and stylometric discussions as a practical label for sentence-initial lexemes.

In practice, researchers extract Ausgangsworts from a corpus and analyze their frequency, distribution, and variety. Depending on the methodological choice, they may count content words, function words, or both at the beginning of sentences, and they may treat short initial phrases as single starting units.

Applications include authorship attribution, genre analysis, and discourse analysis. Ausgangsworts can reveal how texts open topics, cue transitions, or set tone, and they are often studied in combination with surrounding context to model sentence-level patterns for generation or classification.

Examples of common starting words in German texts include Heute, Nun, Darauf, Zunächst, Eigentlich, and Übrigens, illustrating how the initial lexeme can influence pacing and emphasis.