Grammaticalization of verdienen into an auxiliary marker of deontic modality: an item-driven usage-based approach

Buchbeitrag

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.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

Classification and Topics

• Subject: Grammatikalisation ; Verb <verdienen> ; Englisch, Altenglisch

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Czicza, Dániel
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Amsterdam : John Benjamins ; Mannheim : Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS)
• (when): 2022-06-23

Further information

• URN: urn:nbn:de:bsz:mh39-110997
• Last update: 06.03.2025, 9:00 AM CET