The German mit-predicative construction

This paper discusses a usage pattern with German mit ‘with’ that is labelled here as the German mit-predicative construction. The pattern has been mentioned in previous research, but a usage-based constructional account is still missing. A qualitative analysis shows that the construction is subject to a number of constraints that point to its function as a predicative construction. It is argued that its constructional meaning can be adequately captured through the semantic frames of being in a category and having an attribute. Through the application of Hierarchical Configural Frequency Analysis to a corpus-based sample of 356 instances of the mit-predicative, it is shown that the construction can be analyzed as a cluster of five subtypes that display different typical structural and semantic traits. Through the analysis, the paper offers a perspective on intra-constructional variation and how such variation can be exploited for the purpose of grammatical description.