Third Party Funds Group - Sub project
Acronym: GRK 2839 Project 9
Start date : 01.10.2022
End date : 30.09.2027
Fundamental work in cognitive linguistics has highlighted the role of space and spatial expressions to the cognitive organization of language (Talmy 1983, 2008, Lakoff and Johnson 1980), which resulted in a very detailed interest in the semantics of prepositions and their organization in semantic networks already quite early on (see Sandra and Rice 1995 for an overview and a critique). This project will be concerned with an analysis of German prepositions and the central role they play in the expression of space, time, instrumentality, and modality both in concrete and more abstract uses such as the so-called governed prepositions (see e.g. Breindl 1989 for a detailed account of prepositional objects). Recent constructional treatments of German prepositions, such as the ones by Rostila (2014, 2015, 2018) and Zeschel (2019) will provide the theoretical starting point. German constructions with prepositions such as mit ‘with’, unter ‘under’, zwischen ‘between’ and über ‘over’, um ‘round’, zu ‘to’ form semantic nests of similarity, which express roles such as PARTNER or TOPIC in the communication frame (e.g. with diskutieren ‘discuss’, sprechen ‘speak’, Diskussion ‘discussion’, Debatte ‘debate’) (compare the families of overlapping constructions with the preposition into, Herbst & Uhrig 2019). The aim of the project is to provide a corpus-based description of argument structure constructions with these prepositions and an illustration of the way they cluster, i.e. of overlap or links between the various constructions postulated, making use of semantic frames (e.g. German FrameNet) or image schemata. These descriptions, which will also consider aspects such as text types, cultural background etc., can then become entries of the general research constructicon, which is one common aim of the RTG. This part of the project addresses CON 1. (CON1: How do we identify constructions (what are their defining criteria; are they better seen as discrete units, prototypes, attractors in constructional space, or nodes in a network of cognitive associations)?) A contrastive analysis between selected German and English prepositions (in the spirit of Uhrig & Zeschel 2016) will be carried out to determine the extent of language-specific encodings (CON4: To what extent can constructions (and their constituents) identified in one language be equated with superficially similar constructions in another language?). This is directly related to the question of the degree of detail and item-specificity with which such prepositional constructions should be distinguished and stored in the mental constructicon and the reference constructicon (CON2: To what extent is constructional knowledge determined by the specific items occurring in them (colloprofiles) and how can we measure and operationalize the degree of lexical specificity vs. productivity of construction slots?), because if it turns out that uses across English and German are not predictable, a stronger role of storage will have to be assumed. More specifically, possible factors determining construction status will be investigated, including variables related to diachronic or regional variation, and weighted against factors such as individual differences (Dąbrowska 2012a, 2012b, 2015b) and socio-cultural conditions of the use of a construction (USE1: What factors influence speakers’ choices from a range of competing constructions?). The project will make use of various methodological approaches, including hermeneutic analysis of meaning and semantic similarity supported by judgments tests. Most importantly, however, the project will build on the corpus-analytic procedures described by Schierholz (2006) and Zeschel (2015) for the monolingual research and Uhrig & Zeschel (2016) for the contrastive aspects.