Open Access

Claudio Di Meola

• 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.