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Constructional Semantics in German: The Dative of Inaction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2008

Gregor Hens
Gregor Hens
Affiliation:
The Ohio State UniversityDepartment of Germanic Languages and Literatures314 CunzHall Columbus, OH 43210–1228 [hens.l@osu.edu]
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Extract

This article contains arguments for a revised classification of a number of so-called free datives in German. In particular, a distinction is drawn between an ergative dative of inaction construction and an agentive dative of affect. The construction grammar framework is employed to argue that the unique semantics of the dative of inaction (a potential agent fails to prevent an adversative, mutative event) are associated with the abstract syntactic form of the construction as a whole, not with its constituents. Because its semantics are constructional, i.e., not strictly predictable from the semantics of its constituents, the dative of inaction is considered a grammatical category distinct from the dative of affect, which has compositional semantics.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Germanic Linguistics , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , Fall 1997 , pp. 191 - 219
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Germanic Linguistics 1997

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