On the formation of prepositional adverbs in Modern German

Abstract

In this paper, I defend the hypothesis that each prepositional adverb in Modern German is formed from an adverb and a preposition – and not from two adverbs, as recently suggested in the literature. As major support for this hypothesis, I show on the example of darunter that the intensions of the lexical meanings of non-idiomatic prepositional adverbs are compositionally built from the intensions of preposition meanings by combining them in an appropriate way with the intension of an adverb meaning. The proposed analysis, formulated within the general framework of Integrational Linguistics (IL), also provides a solution for the animacy problem of prepositional adverbs, i.e. the problem that many prepositional adverbs in Modern German do not phorically take up animated entities, in particular, persons. This restriction follows, it is argued, from a sortal restriction inherited from the preposition meaning. While syntactic semantics can accommodate preposition meanings in order to properly relate preposition complement interpretations, there is no such accommodation in the case of prepositional adverbs, their valence being lexically reduced by one.

Wortbildung und Flexion in Morphologie und Syntax

“…um die fragestellung näher untersuchen zu können, muss zunächst geklärt werden, was unter ‚ Wort' und ‚stamm' verstanden werden soll. für diese Begriffsklärung wird der Wort-und-Paradigma-ansatz 1 der Integrativen Linguistik (IL) herangezogen (Lieb 1983(Lieb , 1992(Lieb , 2005(Lieb , 2013Eisenberg 1998Eisenberg /99, 2004fuhrhop 1998;Budde 2000Budde , 2012 unter Verwendung der in diesem Rahmen entstandenen Muster-und-Beschränkungs-Theorie (Pattern-and-Restriction Theory oder kurz PR;nolda 2012. Relevante Grundbegriffe von IL und PR werden in abschnitt 2 eingeführt; Leser, die damit vertraut sind, können diesen abschnitt überspringen.…”