Volume 56, Issue 3

This paper surveys the major English-German contrasts associated with the type four metres long . German makes use of an increased inventory of relevant colloca-tions and favours the attributive position. English generally employs a larger set of less explicit structures. For instance, the English type can occur as an opaque noun phrase in contexts not matched by German, and the attributive use in German is regularly rendered by an English structure lacking an adjective. A special section explores the erroneous equation of examples like meterdicke Mauern and metre-thick wall s.

English and German show a contrast in subject-verb agreement in copular sentences of the type The winner is me / Der Gewinner bin ich . The paper presents an analysis of this contrast and suggests ingredients of an explanation for it. The key assumption is that the syntactic subject function is conversely realized by the pre- and postcopular DPs in English as opposed to German sentences of this type. The account of how this difference in the realization of the subject function comes about makes crucial use of considerations concerning grammatical case and inflectional morphology. Information structural aspects are taken into account in order to come to terms with the constituent order peculiarities displayed by copular sentences.

Constraints on passivization have mainly been formulated in terms of semantic properties of verbs and their arguments. Comparative data from English and German suggest that at least in some areas of the lexicon other factors are at work as well. Dif-ferent uses of the English verb meet have been investigated with respect to their occur-rence in the active and passive diatheses. It turns out that there are striking differences between these uses, for some (near) categorical and for others in terms of frequency. A comparison to their German counterparts, each realized as a formally distinct lexeme and each conforming to the general frequency distribution of actives and passives in German, reveals that semantic and pragmatic motivations cannot sufficiently account for the distribution in English. I propose that verb senses and voice values are associated in such a way that semantic ambiguities are minimized.

This paper provides a comparative analysis of verb-noun compounds and their distribution in English and German. It is shown that two major generalizations are pos-sible along the endocentric/exocentric dimension: While the types of endocentric V-N compounds found in English form a subset of the relevant types found in German, exo-centric V-N compounds constitute a substantial lexical class in English but not in German. The distribution of the two major types of V-N compounds is considered against the background of competing expressions such as V- ing N compounds (in English) and synthetic compounds of the type N-V- er (in both languages under comparison). The differences in the inventories of types are related to aspects of external language history (language contact), but the role of language-internal factors is also considered, in par-ticular the greater disposition of English to allow conversion.

In English and French relational adjectives occurring in construction with deverbal nominalizations can be thematically associated with subject as well as object ar-guments. By contrast, in German object-related readings of relational adjectives seem to be inadmissible. The greater flexibility of English and French in terms of the thematic interpretability of relational adjectives also shows up with respect to ‘circumstantial’ thematic roles like directionals, locatives and instrumentals. It is arguably due to the common Latin heritage of English and French, since in Latin relational adjectives repre-senting subject or object arguments of nominalizations are widely attested. However, even in English and French object-related readings are confined to result nominalizations, a restriction we suggest to account for in terms of the more ‘noun-like’ character of result nominalizations in contrast to process nominalizations. Moreover, since argument-related interpretations of relational adjectives can always be overridden by appropriate agentive/patientive phrases, relational adjectives cannot be analyzed as occupying an ar-gument position, but rather as modifying the semantic role associated with it.

This paper gives a short overview of the main contrasts in the structure, meanings and uses of temporal prepositions in English and German. It is shown, in particular, that the deictic components of many prepositions and their uses in English ( ago , come , since , in , etc.) are absent in their German counterparts. Among the lexical differentiations made in only one language special attention is given to the one between the two prepositions by and until in English, both of which are generally translated by the preposition bis in German. It is shown that this differentiation in English and its absence in German have a number of interesting consequences for the translation of time ad-verbials from one language into the other.