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Dieser Beitrag gibt einen Überblick über CoDII, die Collection of Distributionally Idiosyncratic Items. CoDII ist eine elektronische Sammlung verschiedener Untergruppen lexikalischer Elemente, die sich durch idiosynkratische Distribution auszeichnen. Das bedeutet, dass sich die Verteilung dieser Lexeme im Text nicht alleine aufgrund ihrer syntaktischen Kategorie Vorhersagen lässt. Die Methoden, die in der Entwicklung von CoDII angewandt werden, greifen über traditionelle Fachgrenzen hinaus und umfassen Korpuslinguistik, Computerlinguistik, Phraseologie und theoretische Sprachwissenschaft. Ein wichtiger Schwerpunkt unserer Diskussion liegt auf der Darstellung, inwiefern die in CoDII gesammelten, annotierten und unter anderem mit Suchwerkzeugen abfragbaren Daten dazu beitragen können, die linguistische Theoriebildung durch die Bereitstellung sorgfältig aufbereiteter Datensammlungen bei der Überprüfung ihrer Datengrundlage zu unterstützen.

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 present chapter investigates the relative order of attributive adjectives in German. Based on corpus data, our results corroborate previous findings that semantics is the most important factor in accounting for adjective order. Going beyond previous studies, we also consider coordinated structures (such as mit [[großem, verwildertem] Garten] ‘with (a) large, overgrown garden’), where both adjectives are of equal rank. While adjective order in embedded structures (mit [ schwierigem [ familiärem Hintergrund ]] ‘with (a) difficult domestic background’) can be predicted rather accurately on semantic grounds, we show that predictions can also be made for coordinated structures, albeit with lower accuracy. Using regression analysis, we examine how semantic factors interact with a number of other explanatory variables.

This chapter focuses on the formation of adverbs from a corpuslinguistic perspective, providing an overview of adverb formation patterns in German that includes frequencies and hints to productivity as well as combining quantitative methods and theoretically founded hypotheses to address questions that concern possible grammaticalization paths in domains that are formally marked by prepositional elements or inflectional morphology (in particular, superlative or superlative-derived forms). Within our collection of adverb types from the project corpus, special attention is paid to adverbs built from primary prepositions. The data suggest that generally, such adverb formation involves the saturation of the internal argument slot of the relation-denoting preposition. In morphologically regular formations with the preposition in final position, pronominal forms like da ‘there’, hier ‘here’, wo ‘where’ as well as hin ‘hither’ and her ‘thither’ serve to derive adverbs. On the other hand, morphologically irregular formations with the preposition – in particular: zu ‘to’ or vor ‘before, in front of’ – in initial posi-tion show traits of syntactic origin such as (remnants of) inflectional morphology. The pertaining adverb type dominantly saturates the internal argument slot by means of universal quantification that is part and parcel as well of the derivation of superlatives and demonstrably fuels the productivity of the pertaining formation pattern.