No abstract

In this study, German departicipial forms are evaluated. These forms are little prototypical and synchronically used in different syntactic categories. This phenomenon is called transcategoriality. Transcategorial items are characterized by categorical plurality, falling into more than one syntactic category at the same chronological moment. Transcategoriality occurs when an item can be simultaneously placed into multiple categories and does not represent a transitional stage from one word class to another. The studied departicipial forms were classified as transcategorial forms because they fell into more than one category and showed the characteristics of each class to which they were assigned. These forms went through both the lexicalization and grammaticalization processes to achieve plurality of syntactic uses. In terms of lexicalization, these forms went through a conversion process to be part of lexical classes as adjectives and adverbs. In the case of grammaticalization, departicipial forms integrated more grammatical classes, such as prepositions and conjunctions, through the reanalysis mechanism. Some of the studied departicipial forms were found in up to four distinct categories. The aim of this study is to describe the occurrences of these forms according to their different uses. Thus, a corpus of research was compiled based on authentic synchronic texts from 2014 to 2015. Based on the entries in the corpus, departicipial forms were analyzed and their word classes were determined. Evidence and analysis of the syntactic environment of each use were utilized to verify the uses of the forms in the different word classes.