Open Access

Dániel Czicza

• This paper investigates two verbal constructions containing the German verb verdienen (‘to earn / deserve’), e.g. er verdient sich sein Brot ‘he earns his living’ (lit. he earns himself his bread) und er verdient gewürdigt zu werden ‘he deserves to be appreciated". It is shown that the notion of analogy allows for motivating some important features of particular constructions with verdienen. Two interpretations of analogy are employed: analogy in the sense of non-hierarchical family resemblance on the one hand, and analogy leading to changes by mapping a structure from one domain to another on the other hand. It is suggested that both verdienen in combination with sich and verdienen in combination with a verbal complement can be accounted for by focusing on their formal and semantic similarities connecting them to other constructions coming from the same construction family. Moreover, it is shown that versprechen and vermögen could be regarded as analogical models for verdienen.