A constructionist study of verbless directives in German and French.
(2017) AfLiCo, Association française de linguistique cognitive; Discourse, cognition and constructions: implications and applications — Location: Liège (31.May.2017)
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- Since Talmy’s (2000) seminal work it is well-known that German as a satellite-framed language expresses the path of motion mainly with satellites and the manner of motion in the main verb. Short constructions expressing a dynamic motion along a path without any verb are also possible in oral German, e.g. (1) Ab ins Bett ! (lit. ‘Off into the bed!’) (2) Rauf auf den Berg! (lit. ‘Upwards on the mountain! ’) (3) Hinein ins Vergnügen! (lit. ‘Within into the pleasure’) (4) Los, ins Wasser! (lit. ‘Go, into the water!’) (5) Ins Boot bitte! (lit. ‘Into the boat please!’). With a collection of oral examples from the IDS corpora, the presentation describes such usage-based ‘verb-free’ examples (compare Jacob’s (2008) “verblose Direktiva”) in the framework of Talmy’s (2000) typology and Goldberg’s (1995; 2006) Construction Grammar model. The study focuses on the syntactic and semantic constraints for the production of such examples. Pragmatically, these constructions mostly express orders or commands. They are often composed of a prepositional phrase introduced by a locative two-way preposition (e.g. in, auf) followed by a noun which designates a concrete or fictive location. The nominal phrase is often preceded by an adverb which expresses the path of motion (in examples (2) and (3) it is a pronominal adverb also expressing the perspective of the speaker) or the source or start of the movement (examples 1, 4). But examples without such an adverb are also possible as illustrated in (5). This is possible because the expression of the motion trajectory is further sustained by the German case system, the accusative case being used after the two-way preposition for the expression of dynamic motion along a path. The study further describes the typological differences between Germanic and Romance languages. It shows that the German 'verb-free' expressions of motion are almost not possible in the verb-framed Romance languages like French, which does not surprise as the path of motion is expressed in the main verb. But even the Germanic language English does not show so much flexibility in the expression of the motion path - as one can tell from the translations of the above examples. The German examples illustrate the tight interplay between the semantics of the satellites used in the nominal phrase, the morphosyntactic case-marking and the pragmatic function of the phrases.
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De Knop, S. (2017). A constructionist study of verbless directives in German and French. AfLiCo, Association française de linguistique cognitive; Discourse, cognition and constructions: implications and applications, Liège. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/226871