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PDF, German - main document Download (831kB) | Lizenz: Rektionsschwankungen des präpositionalen Kasusgebrauchs. Die Genitiv- und Dativrektion bei Sekundärpräpositionen im diachronen Verlauf by Neuhauser, Lara Vivienne underlies the terms of Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0

Abstract

In my master's thesis, I investigate the German case system in the government of secondary prepositions. In contemporary speech, secondary prepositions mainly govern the genitive or dative, without any semantic difference. In diachronic progression, it can often be observed that the case government shifts from genitive to dative and vice versa. Currently, some secondary prepositions are subject to fluctuations in their case government, which can lead to uncertainty as to which case is considered correct from a normative perspective. In the academic literature, various reasons are given for these fluctuations, such as the differentiation of a preposition from its donor lexeme or the generally higher prestige of the genitive. In order to find out more about fluctuations in the case government of secondary prepositions, I conducted an extensive corpus analysis of the contemporary language. In the process, six exemplary prepositions - three of which with original genitive government (laut, zuzüglich, abzüglich) and three with original dative government (entgegen, entlang, binnen) - were examined in corpora of the following text types: Newspaper texts (regional and national), fiction and light literature, political speeches, legal texts and discussions by Wikipedia contributors. In addition, these prepositions were examined in two historical corpora from the 17th to the 20th century. The analyses showed, firstly, that the genitive is better able to establish itself as a new case and also survives longer than the dative. Secondly, it could be shown that more norm-oriented text types such as legal texts tend to have a conservative case government, whereas colloquial texts such as Wikipedia discussions have a more progressive trend. And thirdly, it was noticeable that not only genitive and dative are involved in the case government of the prepositions studied: The other two cases, accusative and nominative, also occur in some instances. However, a much larger part of the samples does not show any discernible case. In addition, the prepositions abzüglich, zuzüglich and entlang are sometimes connected with primary prepositions (e.g. zuzüglich zu, entlang an). Thus, the phenomenon of prepositional case government is very complex; it goes far beyond the depiction in grammars and dictionaries, both in older New High German and in the contemporary speech.