430 Deutsch
Refine
Year of publication
- 2019 (2)
Document Type
- Part of a Book (2)
Language
- German (2)
Has Fulltext
- yes (2)
Is part of the Bibliography
- yes (2)
Keywords
- Muster <Struktur> (2) (remove)
Publicationstate
Reviewstate
Publisher
- Stauffenburg (2)
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.
In German linguistics, a traditional distinction is made between (i) prepositional objects (POs) and prepositional adverbials, and (ii), among the latter, between adverbial complements and adjuncts. As a contribution to the debate on points of contact and possible syntheses between valency-based and construction-based approaches to verb argument structure, a corpus-based constructionist account of German PO and PP adverbial verb argument structures involving the preposition vor ‘in front of’ is developed. It is argued that ‘desemanticised’ PO-uses of vor are markers of inherently meaningful verb argument structure constructions that form a transparently motivated network comprising both PO and PP adverbial patterns. Analyses are presented for five interrelated families of vor constructions within the overall network thus defined. Their meanings are shown to reflect an interplay of more concrete spatial meanings of the preposition and the lexical semantics of verbal fillers of these constructions. Once conventionalised, they are subject to regular processes of metaphorical and metonymic semantic extension that are tentatively unravelled to create an integrated semantic map of verbal vor-constructions in present day German.