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Article: Why a folder lies in the basket although it is not lying: the semantics and use of German positional verbs with inanimate Figures (1).(Report)
- Article from:
- Linguistics: an interdisciplinary journal of the language sciences
- Article date:
- September 1, 2007
- Author:
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Abstract
In this paper we will investigate the meaning and use of positional verbs in colloquial Standard German. Positional verbs are defined as those verbs which may appear in the basic construction that functions as an answer to a "where"-question, the so-called Basic Locative Construction (BLC). Within this class of verbs, we focus on those positionals which are used to describe the configuration of inanimate movable objects. We will demonstrate that German exhibits the characteristics of a positional (or "multiverb") language, i.e., a language that uses a comparatively large set of verbs in the BLC. The ten positionals used most frequently in our data are ...
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Article: Grounding objects in space and place: locative constructions in ...
Linguistics: an interdisciplinary journal of the language sciences;
September 1, 2007 ;
700+ words
... ... with reduced locative adpositional systems (e.g., in Tzeltal, Bohnemeyer and Brown this issue). In languages with positional verbs, a bottle on its side may typically still be described as 'standing', since it is the intrinsic long axis and its default ...
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