Zustandspassiv

The project "Grammatik und Pragmatik des Zustandspassivs" investigates the meaning of the German stative passive. The central aim is to analyze the underlying lexical, grammatical, conceptual, and pragmatic conditions which affect the stative passive and to reconstruct their interaction in a theoretically and empirically motivated model which takes into account different kinds of data (corpus data, experimental data, introspective data). The starting point of our investigation is the working hypothesis that the structure known as the stative passive is a combination of a copula plus an adjectivized verbal participle by which an ad hoc property is ascribed to the referent of the subject term. While the grammar imposes only few constraints on the construction; the task of legitimating and interpreting such an ad hoc property in context is basically the task of pragmatics. To substantiate this claim, 1778 instances of adjectival passives were extracted from the syntactically annotated Tiger corpus (release 1.0) and Tübinger Baumbank TüBa-D/Z and annotated by the following criteria: 1. verb classes, 2. type of occurring modifiers, 3. morphological form of the past participle (un-affixation, adjectival composition). These categorizations serve (i) to study the constraints on formation and combination of adjectival passives and (ii) to demonstrate the adjectival status of the participle involved in this construction type. The relevant items were extracted from the corpora together with their context, i.e. with one preceding and one following sentence to allow for the study of context effects in the formation and interpretation of adjectival passives.