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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.
Gute Argumente. Wo beginnen?
(2019)
Gerade allgemeinere Verben zeigen eine Variationsbreite der Verwendung, die nicht leicht zu einem einheitlichen Bild zu fassen ist. Am Beispiel des Verbs beginnen wird gezeigt, wie hier die Interaktion zwischen der Struktur der Aktanten und den grammatischen Regelmäßigkeiten funktioniert. Dabei wird versucht, in der Kombination von Valenzinformationen, Argumentstrukturpositionierungen und Musterbildungen im Gebrauch ein zusammenhängendes Bild dieses Verbs in seinen verschiedenen Verwendungen zu entwerfen.
Central complements: good arguments are self-explanatory.
Together with its central complements, verbs model basic patterns of interaction. The constellations of these complements in turn correspond to central patterns of the argument structure. Nominative and accusative complements formally occupy the first and second positions (subject and object), but they also have certain semantic preferences. The formal function of the dative is less pronounced, where it occurs (ditransitive verbs) the semantic imprint of the frame („transfer“) is very strong. This corresponds to the meaning of a core group of corresponding verbs. Other verbs that allow this pattern are used more often in other valence structures and the ditransitive use appears as a systematic way of personal extension of object‑related activities. This will be discussed with reference to the verbs zeigen and (in a different way) lehren.
The following article shows how several verbal argument structure patterns can build clusters or families. Argument structure patterns are conceptualised as form-meaning pairings related by family relationships. These are based on formal and / or semantic characteristics of the individual patterns making up the family. The small family of German argument structure patterns containing vor sich her and vor sich hin is selected to illustrate the process whereby pattern meaning combines with the syntactic and semantic properties of the patterns’ individual components to constitute a higher-level family or cluster of argument structure patterns. The study shows that the patterns making up the family are similar with regard to some of their formal characteristics, but differ quite clearly with respect to their meaning. The article also discusses the conditions of usage of the individual patterns of the family, the contribution of verb meaning and prepositional meaning to the overall meaning of the patterns, coercion effects, and productivity issues.
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.
Novel formats of construction-based description hold great potential for phenomena that fall through the cracks in traditional kinds of linguistic reference works. On the example of German verb argument structure constructions with a prepositional object, we demonstrate that a construction-based description of such phenomena is superior to existing lexicographic and grammaticographic treatments, but that it also poses a number of new problems. The most fundamental of these relates to the fact that construction-based analyses can be proposed on different levels of abstraction. We illustrate pertinent problems relating to the precise identification of constructional form and meaning and suggest a multi-layered descriptive format for web-based electronic reference constructica that can accommodate these challenges. Semantically, the proposed solution integrates both lumping and splitting perspectives on constructional grain size and permits users to flexibly zoom in and out on individual elements in the resource. Formally, it can capture variation in the number and marking of realised arguments as found in e.g. passives and transitivity alternations. Aspects of the theoretical controversy between Construction Grammar and Valency Theory are addressed where relevant, but our focus is on questions of description and the practical implementation of construction-based analyses in a suitable type of linguistic reference work.
This paper investigates emergent pseudo-coordination in spoken German. In a corpus-based study, seven verbs in the first conjunct are analyzed regarding the degree of semantic bleaching and the development of subjective or aspectual meaning components. Moreover, it is shown that each verb shows distinct tendencies for co-ocurrences, especially with deictic adverbs in the first conjunct and with specific verbs and verb classes in the second conjunct. It is argued that pseudo-coordination is originally motivated by the need for ‘chunking’ in unplanned speech and that it is still prominently used in this function in German, in contrast to languages in which pseudo-coordination is grammaticalized further.
Starting from early approaches within Generative Grammar in the late 1960s, the article describes and discusses the development of different theoretical frameworks of lexical decomposition of verbs. It presents the major subsequent conceptions of lexical decompositions, namely, Dowty’s approach to lexical decomposition within Montague Semantics, Jackendoff’s Conceptual Semantics, the LCS decompositions emerging from the MIT Lexicon Project, Pustejovsky’s Event Structure Theory, Wierzbicka’s Natural Semantic Metalanguage, Wunderlich’s Lexical Decompositional Grammar, Hale and Kayser’s Lexical Relational Structures, and Distributed Morphology. For each of these approaches, (i) it sketches their origins and motivation, (ii) it describes the general structure of decompositions and their location within the theory, (iii) it explores their explanative value for major phenomena of verb semantics and syntax, (iv) and it briefly evaluates the impact of the theory. Referring to discussions in article 7 [Semantics: Foundations, History and Methods] (Engelberg) Lexical decomposition, a number of theoretical topics are taken up throughout the paper concerning the interpretation of decompositions, the basic inventory of decompositional predicates, the location of decompositions on the different levels of linguistic representation (syntactic, semantic, conceptual), and the role they play for the interfaces between these levels.