The organization of the German clausal grounding system

This chapter examines the verbal categories of German in terms of grounding predications. Using the broad notion of deixis as a starting point for the examination, it first proposes a unified description of grounding predications as a particular class of deictic expressions. Second, it suggests that three general classification criteria – the nature of the grounded entity, the nature of the grounding relation, and the construal configuration of the ground – constitute a model which may be applied on grounding predications in different languages in order to discover their similarities and differences. The proposed model is applied to the German clausal grounding system, concentrating on German temporal and modal grounding predications.