Die Dativalternation im Deutschen vom Standpunkt der einzelsprachlich-funktionellen Syntax: Synchronie und Diachronie

Abstract This article examines the alternation between the dative object construction (e.g. Der Kassierer gab dem Räuber das Geld aus der Kasse ‘The cashier gave the robber the money from the cash drawer’) and the prepositional object construction (e.g. Der Körper gibt Signale an den Kopf ‘The body sends signals to the head’) in German on the basis of synchronic and diachronic corpus data. The analysis adopts a language-specific functional perspective on grammatical structures along the lines of Eugenio Coserius “Funktionelle Syntax” approach, but also considers current developments in the discussion on argument structure constructions. Theoretically, the approach revolves around three key factors: i) the principled distinction between language-specific meaning (“signifié”), designation (reference) and text-meaning (“Sinn”, “sensus”); ii) a focus on language-specific grammatical functions and the different levels of grammatical structuring, including the Coserian account of “grammatical synonymy”, and iii) the distinction between the language system (“langue”) and normal (i.e. conventionalized) language use. On the empirical side, the study reports the findings of multivariate analyses of a large number of annotated sentences with four ditransitive verbs (geben ‘give’, übergeben ‘transfer, hand over, deliver’, senden ‘send’ and schicken ‘send’), which are analysed against the background of a layered model for the synchronic and diachronic account of the dative alternation in German. The model establishes the hierarchical relationship between a higher-level ‘constructeme’ (the ‘ditransitive construction’ in the narrow sense of the term), which is underspecified in terms of its language-specific expression and meaning, and two ‘allostructions’, the dative object construction and the prepositional object construction respectively, which are the constructional variants of the dative alternation. The model also accommodates the variation between the prepositions an and zu (‘to’) found with a number of ditransitive verbs in the prepositional object construction.