Semantic Potential of German Deverbatives Through the Prism of Taxis

Abstract

 This article describes the semantic potential of German deverbatives that perform various taxis functions in utterances with prepositions having adverbial semantics. The material of this study includes German utterances containing deverbatives with prepositions, obtained by purposive sampling using the databases of the Digital Dictionary of the German Language (Digitale Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache) and Leipzig Corpora Collection (Wortschatz Leipzig). The author applied the following methods: descriptive, inductive, and hypothetical-deductive, as well as generalization and interpretation of linguistic material and contextual analysis. Taking on the lexical meanings of the source verbs, deverbatives demonstrate semantic correlation with them. Along with verbal semantics, they inherit “taxisness”, i.e. an ability to actualize categorial taxis meanings. In addition to the semantics of the source verb, “taxisness” is associated with the way of word formation of the corresponding deverbative. In this regard, the purpose of the article was to describe German deverbatives with various lexical and derivational semantics acting as a means of actualizing categorial taxis meanings in utterances with prepositional constructions. In the course of the study, the author found that stative deverbatives, which have the maximum degree of “taxisness”, actualize primary taxis meanings. The implemented taxis functions of processual deverbatives include primary and conditional taxis functions. Stative and processual nouns include nominalized infinitives and nouns ending in -ung. Actional deverbatives with various derivational semantics (nominalized infinitives, suffixal derivatives ending in -ung, -e, -t and non-affixal nouns) perform the maximum number of taxis functions (primary and secondary taxis functions). Some processual and actional deverbatives ending in -ung are characterized by “objectified” meanings of stativeness and result of an action and are, therefore, limited in their taxis realizations.