| Abstract |
In German, there are two quasi symmetrical constructions: vor sich hin and vor sich her. These constructions are relatively frequent; however, their meanings have not been sufficiently investigated and their lexicographic description remains rather poor. These constructions are highly idiosyncratic, at least from the perspective of other languages, i.e. speakers have no chance to use them properly if they do not learn them as idiomatic units of the lexicon. The reason is that the meaning of these constructions does not come about as a result of the composition of meanings of their constituent parts. In this sense, these two constructions have also to be studied within both phraseology and Construction Grammar.
The best way to deal with the semantics of vor sich hin lexicographically is to postulate a prototypical meaning of this construction and to impose semantic rules (in the sense of Apresjan), which modify the prototypical meaning according to the context. In other words, here we are dealing with coercion. The semantic features that are good candidates for the structure of the prototypical meaning are ‘duration’, ‘introversion’, ‘week intensity’, ‘uncontrallability’, ‘not result-oriented’. In every single VP-construction, the prototypical meaning is specified through focusing some of the semantic features and/or deleting others.
The corpus-based analysis of the construction vor sich her showed similar results. From the theoretical perspective, this construction deserves special attention because of the semantic contribution of the deictic element her. It is obvious that here we are not dealing with the ‘standard meaning’ of her. The deictic element her focuses here the idea of the ‘parallel movement’. Obviously, the deictic elements hin and her have a much richer semantic potential than is assumed in the traditional lexicological and lexicographic description. |
| BibTex |
@InProceedings{ELX10-126,
author = {D.O. Dobrovol’skij},
title = {Deiktische Konstruktionen des Deutschen aus lexikographischer Perspektive},
pages = {1282-1290},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 14th EURALEX International Congress},
year = {2010},
month = {jul},
date = {6-10},
address = {Leeuwarden/Ljouwert, The Netherlands},
editor = {Anne Dykstra and Tanneke Schoonheim},
publisher = {Fryske Akademy},
isbn = {978-90-6273-850-3},
} |
