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In:Non-Nuclear Cases
Edited by Nicole Delbecque, Karen Lahousse and Willy Van Langendonck
[Case and Grammatical Relations Across Languages 6] 2014
► pp. 95–126

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German two-way prepositions and related phenomena

Published online: 17 December 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/cagral.6.04dra
This paper examines German two-way prepositions governing both the accusative and the dative. It shows that sticking to concepts such as static location (DAT) vs change of location, movement or direction (ACC), as is still done in traditional grammars, falls short of being descriptively and explanatorily adequate. Although Paul’s (1920) dichotomy between emerging relationship (ACC) and existing relationship (DAT) constituted a major, though hardly noted improvement, it remains counterintuitive in that it characterizes ablative and perlative datives as expressing existing relationships. Shifting to a dichotomy between emerging relationship (ACC) and non-emerging relationship (DAT) permits to characterize the positively defined accusative as the marked option and the negatively defined dative as the default option, generalizing over all dative subclasses.
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