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(2020)
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.
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.