Research Explorer

Project

Investigating the productivity of the alternating Dat-Nom/Nom-Dat construction in Present-Day German and Icelandic
Code
01CD4223
Duration
01 January 2024 → 30 April 2024
Funding
Regional and community funding: Special Research Fund
Research disciplines
  • Humanities and the arts
    • German language
    • Other European languages
    • Contrastive linguistics
    • Synchronic linguistics
    • Syntax
Keywords
noncanonical case marking productivity corpus linguistics subjecthood Construction Grammar word order
 
Project description
 

This study investigates the productivity of the alternating Dat-Nom/Nom-Dat construction in German and Icelandic. Through both a corpus study and a number of psycholinguistic experiments, we show that the verbs in question alternate between two case frames, and hence that subjecthood is constructionally determined. Preliminary (corpus) results for both languages individually show that such is indeed the case.