A socio-linguistic analysis of the German alternation between "bis an" and "bis zu" constructions.

De Knop, Sabine
(2010) 34th International LAUD Symposium: „Cognitive Sociolinguistics: Language variation in its structural, conceptual and cultural dimensions“. — Location: University of Koblenz-Landau (Landau Campus). (15.March.2010)

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Linguistic variation characterizes German constructions with a prepositional group introduced by the preposition bis (‘until’, ‘up to’, ‘as long as’) followed by a second preposition [bis + PREP2], like in (1) Er begleitete mich bis zur Gartentür (‘He accompanied me to the garden gate’); (2) Er begleitete mich bis an die Gartentür (‘He accompanied me up to the garden gate’). The selection of the second preposition reflects diversity in construal: The use of zu (‘to’) highlights the endpoint (of an implied path or trajectory); with an (‘up to’) it is the path towards the gate which is focussed upon. This static/dynamic difference is also reflected in the case marking at the morpho-syntactic level: The preposition zu requires a dative case, whereas an – which as a ‘two-way preposition’ (Smith 1995) can alternate between the dative or the accusative (see Leys 1989 and 1995) - will require an accusative in these constructions for the explicit focusing on the whole stretch of the path, leading to its end. It is the lexical frame of the noun used after [bis + PREP2] that presupposes a built-in scale determining the choice of [PREP2]. Examples from the two German corpora DWDS and Cosmas II (IDS Mannheim) seem to confirm a first intuition that the preposition zu is preferred when the noun has a more abstract meaning, e.g. (3) Er begleitete mich bis zum Sieg ('He accompanied me up to victory/until I won'); (4) …ein weiter Weg bis zum Verbot dieser Munition (Cosmas II) ('… a long way up to the prohibition of this ammunition'). But often the lexical frame for the decision of whether to use bis an or bis zu cannot be limited to the noun accompanying the prepositional group and it is only when considering the collexemes in a larger context that the conceptual and meaning differences become clear, as illustrated by the following example: (5) Die…Detektivin…verfolgte beide bis zu einem Hause in der Neanderstraße. - Sie benachrichtigte nun die Polizei,… (DWDS corpus); ‘The…detective…tracked both up to a house in the Neanderstreet. - Then she informed the police,…' The collexeme nun in the second sentence stresses the goal attainment. But does the interpretation of the linguistic variation as presented in (1) and (2) reflect expert analysis or does it correspond to folk perception as well? A quick inquiry allows to conclude that the differentiated interpretation between (1) and (2) is hardly perceived by German non-highly educated natives. Starting from examples from the two German written corpora DWDS and Cosmas II and the German learners' corpus Falko the study will aim at finding out how strongly the differences between bis an- and bis zu-schemas are entrenched in different speaker groups: highly educated German natives as opposed to non-highly educated German adults, also compared with 8-10 year old pupils for the interpretation of schemas in development and with foreign learners of German for the analysis of schemas in acquisition. References De Knop, Sabine and René Dirven (2008), Motion and location events in German, French and English: A typological, contrastive and pedagogical approach. In Cognitive Approaches to Pedagogical Grammar: A Volume in Honour of René Dirven, Sabine De Knop and Teun De Rycker (eds.), 298-327. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Di Meola, Claudio (2000), Die Grammatikalisierung deutscher Präpositionen. Tübingen: Stauffenburg. (= Studien zur deutschen Grammatik 62). Goldberg, Adele (1995), Constructions. A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Goldberg, Adele (2006), Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leys, Odo (1989), Aspekt und Rektion räumlicher Präpositionen. Deutsche Sprache 17: 97-113. Leys, Odo (1995), Dativ und Akkusativ in der deutschen Sprache der Gegenwart. Leuvense Bijdragen 84: 39–62. Radden, Günter and René Dirven (2007), Cognitive English Grammar. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Serra-Borneto, Carlo (1997), Two-way prepositions in German: Image and constraints. In Lexical and Syntactical Constructions and the Construction of Meaning, Marjolijn Verspoor, Kee Dong Lee, and Eve Sweetser (eds.), 187–204. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Smith, Michael B. (1995), Semantic motivation vs. arbitrariness in grammar: Toward a more general account of the DAT/ACC contrast with two-way prepositions. In Insights in Germanic Linguistics: Methodology and Transition, Irmengard Rauch and Gerald F.Carr (eds.), 293–323. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Stefanowitsch, Anatol, and Stefan Th. Gries (2003), Collostructions: investigating the interaction of words and constructions. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 8(2): 209-243. Talmy, Leonard (2000), A typology of event integration. In: Talmy, Leonard (ed), Toward a Cognitive Semantics, vol. 2. Cambridge: MIT Press. Tyler, Andrea and Vyvyan Evans (2003), The Semantics of English Prepositions:Spatial Scenes, Embodied Meaning and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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De Knop, S. (2010). A socio-linguistic analysis of the German alternation between “bis an” and “bis zu” constructions. 34th International LAUD Symposium: „Cognitive Sociolinguistics: Language variation in its structural, conceptual and cultural dimensions“., University of Koblenz-Landau (Landau Campus). https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/190448