Open Access

Arne Zeschel, Kristel Proost, Ekaterina Laptieva

• We present a construction-based approach to German prepositional object (I’O) constructions occurring with the verb begeistern ,to thrill'. Traditionally, the preposition in such structures is analysed as a meaningless object marker that is lexically selected by the governing verb and not subject to variation. Drawing on a corpus study in the German reference corpus DeReKo, we show that our target verb occurs with four different PO prepositions (für ,lor‘,« ׳? ,at', von ,front' and über ,over‘) that can be analysed as markers o f schematic argument structure constructions in the Construction Grammar sense. We show that each construction comes with its own meaning and semantically coherent predicate restrictions. We argue that purely valency-based (lexical) approaches to argument structure fail to capture these generalisations. On the other hand, purely schema-based (constructionist) approaches to argument structure face the complcmentary problem o f accommodating item-specific restrictions and exceptions to the generalisations they embody. We suggest that the necessary synthesis can be formulated within an account that recognises both generalised constructions and item-specific valency properties.