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Modality and Diachronic Construction Grammar
Edited by Martin Hilpert, Bert Cappelle and Ilse Depraetere
[Constructional Approaches to Language 32] 2021
► pp. 81–122

Grammaticalization of verdienen into an auxiliary marker of deontic modality

An item-driven usage-based approach

 | Leibniz Universität Hannover
 | Leibniz Universität Hannover
 | Leibniz Universität Hannover
This paper investigates synchronic variation in the lexical and grammatical environments of the German lexical verb verdienen ‘earn’, ‘deserve’. In its lexical uses, verdienen co-occurs with an object noun phrase whose head is either concrete (e.g. Geld ‘money’) or, more commonly, abstract (e.g. Beachtung ‘attention’). When it is used more grammatically with deontic modal meaning, verdienen is followed by a passive or active infinitive. This paper uses collostructional analyses to contrast lexical and grammatical uses in terms of the most strongly attracted lexical items, which are grouped into semantic classes. The results reflect different degrees of host-class expansion (cf. Himmelmann 2004), whereby the collexemes of verdienen expand from concrete to abstract and their morpho-syntactic contexts from nominal to infinitival complement and subsequently from passive to active. Synchronic distribution can thus serve as a window on diachronic development (Kuteva 2001), in this case the rise of a deontic modality marker.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
    • 2.1Grammaticalization and constructional concepts
    • 2.2Deontic modality
      • 2.2.1Obligation and permission
      • 2.2.2Stativity and scope
      • 2.2.3The rise of modal meaning
  • 3.Methods
    • 3.1Data and identification of constructions with verdienen
    • 3.2Simple collexeme analysis
    • 3.3Semantic classification of strongly attracted lexemes
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Discussion
    • Lex1 and Lex2
    • Movement along the grammaticalization path from LEX to GRAM
    • Gram1 and Gram2
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 12 October 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cal.32.04die
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