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What do corpora reveal about ongoing grammaticalization and transitions between word class categories? Everything, something, or nothing? Using the example of the lexemes nicneříkající, nichtssagend, všeříkající and vielsagend the authors examine the syntactic distribution and semantics of participial adjectives. To what extent do the Czech and German equivalents differ? What (if any) effect does the orthography have (i.e. whether the expressions are written as compounds or as chains of separate words)? Is a new form accompanied by a new function? The text presents an analysis of monolingual corpora (SYN, DeReKo) and a parallel corpus (InterCorp).
This paper gives a survey over the forms that can be used as prepositions in contemporary German. Apart from prototypical prepositions such as an [at, by], auf [on] or in [in], there are prepositions with the form of a content word or the form of a syntactical structure. Prepositions with the form of a content word look like adverbs (e.g. abseits [away], außerhalb [outside]), verbs (entsprechend [corresponding], betreffend [concerning]), adjectives (nahe [near], seitlich [at the side]) or nouns (trotz [despite], kraft [by virtue]); prepositions with the form of a syntactical structure look like prepositional phrases (im Gefolge [in the wake], am Rande [on the brink]). These "atypical" prepositions are of special interest for two reasons: (1) they raise the question of the delimitation of the grammatical category "preposition"; (2) unlike prototypical prepositions, they are often characterized by semantically irrelevant variations in position (preposing vs postposing) and in the choice of the governed case (dative vs genitive). These synchronic variations are documented by authentic examples from a large corpus of written German of the 90s, and are explained on the basis of a diachronic gramrnaticalization rnodel.
The present paper deals with grammaticalization as a comprehensive model of erosive processes in the history of natural languages, exemplified in German and Brazilian Portuguese. Grammaticalization is conceived of as the reduction of pragmatic versatility, semantic concreteness, syntactic liberty and phonetic substance of linguistic elements. It is subdivided into the processes of lexicalization, which transforms polylexematic into monolexematic elements, and deslexicalization, which reduces lexematic to sublexematic elements. In the middle of these processes stands the lexicon, which is seen as the central stock of linguistic elements. Within the lexicon, the process of grammaticalization continues, from lexical word classes through intermediate classes to grammatical word classes. The lower boundary of the lexicon is critical threshold, down to which the process of grammaticalization is compensated for by linguistic recycling that leads lexematic elements back into the linguistic circuit, through the formation of new polylexematic units. Beyond this threshold, however, no recycling is possible any more, so that elements which have once lost their lexical character are condemned to disappear in the long run. The different stages of grammaticalization are introduced and illustrated by means of concrete examples, first from Brazilian Portuguese and afterwards from German.