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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).
Der Schauinsland – die Mobiliar - das Turm : das referentielle Genus bei Eigennamen und seine Genese
(2014)
Das Genus von Eigennamen verhält sich grundlegend anders als das von Appellativen. Im Zuge der Proprialisierung legen Eigennamen ihr appellativisch ererbtes Genus ab und entwickeln nach und nach ein eigenes, referentiell zugewiesenes Genus, das fest mit einer bestimmten Objektklasse verbunden ist (sieh die Kaiser Wilhelm als Schiff, das Kaiser Wilhelm als Hotel). Damit leisten die onymischen Genera einen echten Beitrag zur Klassifikation und bilden einen Fall von Degrammatikalisierung. Dieser Artikel untersucht die Entstehung und Festigung onymischer Genera am Beispiel von Namen für Flüsse, Berge, Restaurants und Hotels, Versicherungen, Banken, Fluggesellschaften, Autos, Motorräder und Konzerne und stellt das Prinzip eines onymischen Ikonismus auf.
This paper deals with selected semantic, morphological and syntactic characteristics of Yiddish modal verbs, compared to their cognates in German and other Germanic language. In particular, it focuses on the modal ker, the subjunctive zoln and the conditional with volt. The synchronic description is completed by diachronic observations which refer to the Middle High German basis of Yiddish.
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.