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.