Open Access

Ekaterina Laptieva

• This article investigates the transitive-oblique alternation in German that involves the preposition an ‘at, on’, e.g. ein Buch schreiben ‘write a book’ vs. an einem Buch schreiben ‘work on / write a book’ (lit. write at a book). The crucial semantic difference between the two structures is the obligatory atelic interpretation of the prepositional an-variant. Based on a corpus study for twenty verbs that were discussed in the previous work, I revisit the assumptions that were made by Filip (1999). First, the incremental theme verbs like bauen ‘build’ or essen ‘eat’ appear only seldom with an. This questions the central role of incrementality as the semantic explanation for the acceptability of the an-variant. Second, selectional preferences of verbs differ in the two argument structures. This observation challenges the assumption that the an-phrase and the direct object are alternative syntactic realizations of the same verbal argument. Overall, this first corpus-based study of the an-construction reveals complex interactions between the semantics of individual verbs, verb classes and the meaning of the preposition an.