TY - JOUR U1 - Zeitschriftenartikel, wissenschaftlich - begutachtet (reviewed) A1 - Fortmann, Christian A1 - Wöllstein, Angelika T1 - On the so‐called Absentive – in German JF - Studia Linguistica N2 - This investigation targets a syntactic phenomenon of German which is commonly referred to as the absentive construction. The absentive is considered a universal grammatical category denoting absence. Its syntax is characterised by the occurrence of an auxiliary or copula verb accompanied by a non‐finite VP containing a main verb. The expression of absence, predicated over the clausal subject, is assumed to be based on a constructional meaning. Reviewing a wide range of syntactic and interpretive properties of this structure in German, we will demonstrate that certain empirical claims about the construction are not well founded and that its seemingly idiosyncratic properties are indeed available for compositional analyses. We will propose a structural analysis of its core syntactic and interpretive properties: The predication expresses the localisation of the subject at the location of the event, denoted by the infinitival verb. The interpretation of absence, then, can be explained by an implicature. KW - Deutsch KW - Absentiv KW - Verb Y1 - 2019 UN - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:bsz:mh39-94401 SN - 1467-9582 SS - 1467-9582 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1111/stul.12111 DO - https://doi.org/10.1111/stul.12111 VL - 73 IS - 3 SP - 604 EP - 649 PB - Wiley-Blackwell CY - Oxford [u.a.] ER -