PRÄPOSITIONALE REKTIONSALTERNANZEN IM GESPROCHENEN DEUTSCH. Eine korpusgestützte Analyse struktureller Muster

Abstract

Within prepositional case agreement, the German language manifests a grammatical phenomenon of variation. This regards the use of prepositions with several possible grammatical cases, which do not change the meaning of a sentence. This can give rise to uncertainty in case choice. The empirical foundation is based on studies of corpora of the written language, and possible explanations for the observed variation are sought in the grammaticalization model, analogy etc. In the present study the occurrence and the structural properties of the phenomenon described regarding the written language were used to investigate a corpus of spoken German (FOLK = Forschungs- und Lehrkorpus Gesprochenes Deutsch). Four prepositions (trotz, wegen, während, gemäß) were considered. The variation of case agreement in written German could also be substantiated in spoken German, although the models of explanations were only partially applicable. Based on the current analysis, it was impossible to reduce the results to one principle. The results were somewhat unexpected, for instance the absence of dative agreement in relation to trotz or that hypotheses regarding the relevancy of structural properties of the depending nominal phrase could not be verified to the same extent for all the studied prepositions. In relation to the obtained results, the methodical limitations of this study were critically discussed.