The conceptual and semantic variation of placement verbs in German: Typological and pedagogical challenges.

De Knop, Sabine
(2015) Thinking, Doing, Learning, TDL2: Usage-based Perspectives on Second Language Learning, in Groningen. — Location: Université de Groningen (3.June.2015)

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Abstract
German causative placement verbs like stellen (‘to put upright’), setzen (‘to set’), legen (‘to lay’), stecken (‘to stick’) or hängen (‘to hang’), to name just the most common ones, are favoured in expressions of motion events. German as a satellite-framed language (Talmy 2000) often expresses manner in motion events (De Knop & Gallez 2012). This is also the case with causative placement verbs which express different manner aspects, e.g. the verticality (stellen) or horizontality (legen) dimension. Because these verbs are diachronically linked to their corresponding non-causative posture verbs stehen (‘to stand’), sitzen (‘to sit’), liegen (‘to lie’), stecken (‘to be stuck’) or hängen (‘to be hanging’) (Berthele 2012: 149), there is a tendency in scientific literature to describe both verb categories together (Fagan 1991). This concomitant description of causative and non-causative verbs is certainly efficient (also in foreign language teaching) for the concrete uses of these verbs, e.g. (1) Die Mutter legt das Kind ins Bett. [+ causative] Lit. ’The mother lays the child into the bed.‘ (2) Das Kind liegt im Bett. [- causative] Lit.’The child lies in the bed.’ But as our study shows, this short-cut is inadequate for more abstract uses. E.g. why do Germans say (3) Es steht kein Komma zwischen den Sätzen (Lit. ‘There stands no comma between the sentences’), but (4) Im Deutschen muss man ein Komma zwischen 2 Sätze setzen (Lit. ‘In German one must set a comma between 2 sentences‘)? This pertains even more to the use of placement verbs in collocations. For instance, what motivates the selection of setzen in (5) in Verbindung setzen (lit. ‘to set into contact’, ‘to get in touch’), but of stellen in (6) in den Vordergrund stellen (lit. ‘to put into the foreground’, ‘to give priority to’, ‘to place special emphasis on’)? Compared with the semantic variation of posture verbs (see among others Ameka & Levinson 2007, Kutscher & Schultze-Berndt 2007, or Serra-Borneto 1996), less research has been done in the domain of placement verbs (except for Cadierno, Hijazo-Gascón, & Ibarretxe-Antuñano in prep.; Gullberg 2009; Kopecka & Narasimhan 2011). Surprisingly enough, apart from Berthele’s (2004, 2012) contrastive studies between German and Romansh dialects or Fagan’s (1991) comparative study of German causative and non-causative verbs, almost no research has been done about placement verbs in German. In a pedagogical perspective, the variation and especially the selection of specific causative verbs in collocations cause problems to French-speaking learners of German, even at an intermediate or advanced level. French as a verb-framed language uses one very general verb, namely mettre ‘to put’, to express placement. But teaching manuals for German (E.g. Aufderstraße et al. 1992, 2002 and 2005) do not offer sufficient explanations or aids for the learning of these verbs, except for the selection of the right morpho-syntactic case (either dative or accusative) after the so-called “two-way prepositions” (Smith 1995) or the concrete semantic uses corresponding to the positions objects or humans take when put somewhere (a standing, sitting, lying, hanging or sticking position). This study wants to fill this gap. The aim of the presentation is threefold: 1. In a usage-based perspective, the analysis starts from a list of examples collected in the corpora of the Digitales Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache (DWDS). Based on studies about German non-causative verbs (De Knop 2014, De Knop & Perrez 2014, Serra-Borneto 1996 and Kutscher & Schultze-Berndt 2007), it first describes the conceptual and semantic variation of the corresponding causative verbs. 2. It then extends the analysis to the collocational uses of the 3 most common causative verbs in German (stellen, setzen and liegen) and describes the variety with these verbs. 3. Finally, it develops some teaching strategies for the selection of a specific causative verb in the collocations. Because Cognitive Linguistics postulates a strong link between underlying conceptualizations and linguistic units (Dirven & Ruiz de Mendoza 2012), we postulate a usage-based approach which fosters a re-orientation of the learners on different categories in the foreign language (Ellis & Cadierno 2009). 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De Knop, S. (2015). The conceptual and semantic variation of placement verbs in German: Typological and pedagogical challenges. Thinking, Doing, Learning, TDL2: Usage-based Perspectives on Second Language Learning, in Groningen., Université de Groningen. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/190482