What you give is what you GET? On reanalysis, semantic extension and functional motivation with the German bekommen-passive construction

Abstract

The German “bekommen-passive” is a recipient passive construction that is generally considered to be a case of “grammaticalization-in-progress”. It emerges on the basis of constructional ambiguity: In a bracket structure with a finite form of the verbs bekommen or kriegen (‘to get’, ‘to receive’) and a past participle in sentence-final position, the get-verb can be reanalyzed as a passive auxiliary, when certain structural and semantic conditions are met. The new recipient passive construction is very productive, and its use is even extended to two-place verbs, where a very abstract notion of benefaction or malefaction is possible. The article will analyze the structural and semantic properties of the construction in a range of data and in correlation with the ongoing grammaticalization process of the construction. Also, the particular structural features of German that serve as a starting point for the reanalysis of this construction will be described.

The semantics of the construction will be described on the basis of semantic classes of ditransitive structures, as suggested by Leirbukt 1997 and Goldberg 1995. It will be argued that there is a potentially wide-ranging semantic productivity with a construction, once it is established. Descriptions in terms of a form-function correlation are useful to capture a certain tendency in the meaning, but they should not exclude some potential flexibility with respect to the situation of use.

The motivation for the development of the German bekommen-passive will be outlined with respect to findings and considerations from functional syntactic theories. Evidence from two corpus studies will be discussed to show that the general syntactic-pragmatic principle, that topics tend to become subjects cross-linguistically, motivates the emergence and distribution of the bekommen-passive construction.