Encyclopaedia of German diatheses

Diathesis ("valency alternation") is a sentence structure that reshapes the roles of a verb. The prototypical example of such a diathesis is the well-known passive. However, there are very many other such role-remappings, like antipassives, applicatives, causatives, etc. This book presents...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Cysouw, Michael
Format: eBook
Language:English
Published: Language Science Press 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:
Collection: OAPEN - Collection details see MPG.ReNa
LEADER 03122nma a2200337 u 4500
001 EB002174253
003 EBX01000000000000001312030
005 00000000000000.0
007 cr|||||||||||||||||||||
008 230811 ||| eng
020 |a 9783985540655 
020 |a zenodo.7602514 
100 1 |a Cysouw, Michael 
245 0 0 |a Encyclopaedia of German diatheses  |h Elektronische Ressource 
260 |b Language Science Press  |c 2023 
653 |a Language Arts & Disciplines 
653 |a Linguistics 
653 |a Linguistics 
700 1 |a Cysouw, Michael 
041 0 7 |a eng  |2 ISO 639-2 
989 |b OAPEN  |a OAPEN 
500 |a Creative Commons (cc), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 
024 8 |a 10.5281/zenodo.7602514 
856 4 0 |u https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/id/752d9302-00fe-4f59-a978-a04472f07290/external_content.pdf  |x Verlag  |3 Volltext 
856 4 2 |u https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/63266  |z OAPEN Library: description of the publication 
082 0 |a 400 
082 0 |a 700 
082 0 |a 410 
520 |a Diathesis ("valency alternation") is a sentence structure that reshapes the roles of a verb. The prototypical example of such a diathesis is the well-known passive. However, there are very many other such role-remappings, like antipassives, applicatives, causatives, etc. This book presents an encyclopaedic survey of diathesis in German. The objective is to catalogue all diatheses that exist in this language. Currently almost 250 different German diatheses are described in this book, some highly productive, some only attested for a handful of verbs. The main goal of this book is to present this wealth of grammatical possibility in a unified manner, while at the same time attempting to classify and organise this diversity. A summary of the about 80 most prominent diatheses is also provided, including many newly-minted German names, because most these diatheses did not have a German name yet.  
520 |a This indicates that from a purely grammatical perspective, diathesis ("grammatical voice") is about a two-times more elaborate topic than epithesis ("tense-aspect-mood marking") in German. 
520 |a  It might come as a surprise that there are so many different diatheses in German, but my impression is that in this respect German is no exception among the world's languages. I expect that all languages have a similar abundance of different ways in which to construe a sentence around a lexical predicate. In a sense, a diathesis allows for the expression of a distinct perspective on the event described, something that is arguably a common desire of any language user. Except for diathesis this book also aims to completely catalogue its counterpart: epithesis. An epithesis is a derived sentence structure in which the marking of the verb roles remains constant. Basically, these are the grammaticalised constructions expressing tense-aspect-mood-evidentiality in German. The list of major epitheses is also quite long (about 40 constructions), but it is quite a bit smaller than the list of major diatheses (about 80 constructions).