Zur Entwicklung der modalen verstehen-Konstruktion: Ein Konservierungseffekt im Zuge der Auxiliarisierung Eine quantitative korpusbasierte Studie

• Published in: Zeitschrift für germanistische Linguistik Vol. 48; no. 1; pp. 101 - 135
• Main Author: Dekalo, Volodymyr
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: De Gruyter 27.05.2020
• ISSN: 0301-3294; 1613-0626
• DOI: 10.1515/zgl-2020-0003

The present paper deals with item- and feature-based changes of the modal semi-schematic construction with in written German during the 20th century. To understand this development, the century is divided into four equal periods. Applying a simple collexeme analysis for each time span, the study ascertains which lexical verbs appear as typical items in a schematic slot constituting its collostructional profile. Comparing the distributional behavior manually in a pairwise fashion, the analysis reveals that solely three verbs, namely , and , stay constantly highly attracted within the top collexemes of the -construction during the 20th century. Using a dependency-based semantic space model, the study demonstrates that the collostructional profile of the fourth period differs considerably from the previous time span. Utilizing random forest of conditional inference trees, changes in terms of usage features of the modal construction are pinpointed. As a result, its grammaticality degree has not increased demonstrating solely minor changes in temporal functionality as well as in realization of subject forms.