Regular Meaning Shifts in German Particle Verbs: A Case Study
Sylvia Springorum, Jason Utt, Sabine Schulte im Walde · 2013
This paper provides a corpus-based study on German particle verbs. We hypothesize that there are regular mechanisms in meaning shifts of a base verb in combination with a particle that do not only apply to the individual verb, but across a semantically coherent set of verbs. For example, the syntactically similar base verbs brummen ‘hum ’ and donnern ‘rumble’ both describe an irritating, displeasing loud sound. Combined with the particle auf, they result in near-synonyms roughly meaning ‘forcefully assigning a task’ (in one of their senses). Covering 6 base verb groups and 3 particles with 4 particle meanings, we demonstrate that corpus-based information on the verbs ’ subcategorization frames plus conceptual properties of the nominal complements is a sufficient basis for defining such meaning shifts. While the paper is considerably more extensive than earlier related work, we view it as a case study toward a more automatic approach to identify and formalize meaning shifts in German particle verbs.