Regular Meaning Shifts in German Particle Verbs: A Case Study

This paper provides a corpus-based study on German particle verbs. We hypothesize that there are regular mechanisms in meaning shifts of a base verb in combination with a particle that do not only apply to the individual verb, but across a semantically coherent set of verbs. For example, the syntactically similar base verbs brummen ‘hum’ and donnern ‘rumble’ both describe an irritating, displeasing loud sound. Combined with the particle auf, they result in near-synonyms roughly meaning ‘forcefully assigning a task’ (in one of their senses). Covering 6 base verb groups and 3 particles with 4 particle meanings, we demonstrate that corpus-based information on the verbs’ subcategorization frames plus conceptual properties of the nominal complements is a sufficient basis for defining such meaning shifts. While the paper is considerably more extensive than earlier related work, we view it as a case study toward a more automatic approach to identify and formalize meaning shifts in German particle verbs.