Refine
Year of publication
- 2018 (2)
Document Type
- Article (1)
- Part of a Book (1)
Language
- English (2)
Is part of the Bibliography
- yes (2)
Keywords
- Grammatik (1)
- Korpus <Linguistik> (1)
Publicationstate
Reviewstate
- Peer-Review (2) (remove)
Publisher
This paper investigates the conditions that govern the choice between the German neuter singular relative pronouns das ‘that’ and was ‘what’. We show that das requires a lexical head noun, while in all other cases was is usually the preferred option; therefore, the distribution of das and was is most successfully captured by an approach that does not treat was as an exception but analyzes it as the elsewhere case that applies when the relativizer fails to pick up a lexical gender feature from the head noun. We furthermore show how the non-uniform behavior of different types of nominalized adjectives (positives allow both options, while superlatives trigger was) can be attributed to semantic differences rooted in syntactic structure. In particular, we argue that superlatives select was due to the presence of a silent counterpart of the quantifier alles ‘all’ that is part of the superlative structure.
In recent years, the availability of large annotated and searchable corpora, together with a new interest in the empirical foundation and validation of linguistic theory and description, has sparked a surge of novel and interesting work using corpus-based methods to study the grammar of natural languages. However, a look at relevant current research on the grammar of the Germanic, Romance, and Slavic languages reveals a variety of different theoretical approaches and empirical foci, which can be traced back to different philological and linguistic traditions. Still, this current state of affairs should not be seen as an obstacle but as an ideal basis for a fruitful exchange of ideas between different research paradigms.