Volume 42, Issue 3

The central topic of the study is a construction-based description of the ethical dative in German. Structures with a dativus ethicus are constructions in the sense of Goldberg’s Construction Grammar (1995; 2006), they are not predictable semantically or formally. Prototypically, they presuppose some familiarity or closeness between the discussion partners, they express the emotional position of the speaker towards the event. That is why the ethical dative more frequently appears in oral speech or in fictional text types which simulate orality. Following Wegener (1985; 1989) we distinguish between the Aufforderungs-Ethicus ‘request ethicus’ and the Ausrufe-Ethicus ‘exclamation ethicus’ which together constitute the ethicus-construction . The request ethicus with the pronoun mir ‘to me’ can be considered to be the prototype as it is characterized by high frequency and a clear meaning of involvement (the prototypical ethicus semantics). Constructions with the exclamation ethicus are more peripheral as they are not as frequent as the request ethicus and they are characterized by polysemy. I.e. they are often at the border between the ethicus- and the iudicantis-constructions. The study focuses on the syntactic and semantico-pragmatic properties of the ethicus realization.

The variation of the strong genitive marker of the singular noun has been treated by diverse accounts. Still there is a consensus that it is to a large extent systematic but can be approached appropriately only if many heterogeneous factors are taken into account. Over thirty variables influencing this variation have been proposed. However, it is actually unclear how effective they can be, and above all, how they interact. In this paper, the potential influencing variables are evaluated statistically in a machine learning approach and modelled in decision trees in order to predict the genitive marking variants. Working with decision trees based exclusively on statistically significant data enables us to determine what combination of factors is decisive in the choice of a marking variant of a given noun. Consequently the variation factors can be assessed with respect to their explanatory power for corpus data and put in a hierarchized order.

The concept of grammatical functions has a long and changeful history. It is used in many different theoretical approaches, not least in the grammar that underlies school instruction. However, several problems and inconsistencies are connected with this concept. These problems can be solved if definitions of the individual grammatical functions are homogeneously grounded in formal criteria instead of making recourse to semantics. In this article, an axiomatic approach of this kind is presented which is couched in terms of the paradigm of Linguistic Realism. The set of definitions given affords a basis for the unambiguous analysis of (German) sentences. At the same time, the traditionally distinct concepts of grammatical functions on the one hand and valency of verbs on the other can be merged into a uniform concept. Crucial in this context is a reevaluation of the grammatical function ‘adverbial’.