Volume 46, Issue 3

This article addresses (expanded) prenominal adjectival/participial attributes in modern German and modern Danish. Generally, German is considered more expandable in the prenominal position compared to Danish. However, this topic has never been studied sufficiently on an empirical basis. The article begins by giving a brief comparative survey of the structure of the NP in the respective languages. This is followed by a presentation of the corpus of the study, which consists of prose texts (newspaper articles). An important result of the analysis is that in German, the NP middle field frequently comprises subordinate structures, whereas in Danish, it more often comprises coordinate structures. This contrast is explained by different configurations of linguistic features (gender and number) that are conducive to framing constructions (Ronneberger-Sibold 2010ab).

Sentences with a cognate object typically consist of an intransitive activity verb, its subject NP and a second NP in the accusative. Its nominal core is typically derived as nomen actionis and/or nomen acti from the verb. Essential questions are: How are cognate objects licensed? What role do they play in verbal activity? Which nouns and which verbs come into question? Can the reading of cognitive objects be predicted as an event or object? In this paper I will propose a constructional grammatical analysis. Different readings of the cognate object as well as the temporal constitution as a telic or atelic situation are explained within the construction by compositional processes. These are essentially analyzed as a transfer of the nominal reference mode to the entire VP. The nominal reference method also results from compositional processes within the NP. An important focus of the analysis is on overrides and adjustments (coercion) in case of semantic conflicts.

This essay deals with double perfect constructions in conceptually written contexts. It pursues two goals. First, the spreading mechanisms of double perfect constructions are to be investigated. Analogy to adjective participle forms is one mechanism of several, which can be responsible for the occurrence in double perfect constructions. I will show that the frequency of occurrence as adjectival participle correlates with the occurrence of the same participle in a double perfect construction. A corpus analysis was performed for this purpose. If a participle frequently occurs as an adjective, it partially loses its verbal properties and approaches an adjective status. This can promote the addition of ‘ gewesen ’ / ‘ gehabt ’ to indicate a past tense implication. The proximity of these participles to the adjectival status is also shown by their occurrence in adjectival configurations (e. g. inflected, affixation with ‘ un -‘). In addition, the question is examined whether the double perfect is a new tense. I would like to illustrate that the double perfect forms with ‘ gewesen ’ are mostly to be interpreted adjectivally and are not a new tense. The double forms with ‘ gehabt ’ can theoretically be true double perfect constructions, but depending on the context they can also be analyzed adjectivally.