Konstruktionen mit Positions- und Lokalisierungsverben: sprachtypologische und pädagogische Aspekte

De Knop, Sabine [FUSL]

German causative placement verbs like stellen (‘to put upright’), setzen (‘to set’), or legen (‘to lay’), are favoured in expressions of motion events as they express the manner dimension. Because these verbs are diachronically linked to their corresponding non-causative posture verbs stehen (‘to stand’), sitzen (‘to sit’), or liegen (‘to lie’) (Berthele 2012: 149), there is a tendency in scientific literature to describe both verb categories together (Fagan 1991). This is certainly efficient (also in foreign language teaching) for the concrete uses of these verbs, but inadequate for more abstract uses or for uses in collocations. Compared with the semantic variation of posture verbs (see Ameka & Levinson 2007, Kutscher & Schultze-Berndt 2007, or Serra-Borneto 1996), less research has been done in the domain of placement verbs (except for Berthele 2004, 2012; Cadierno, Hijazo-Gascón, & Ibarretxe-Antuñano in prep.; Gullberg 2009; Kopecka & Narasimhan 2011). In a pedagogical perspective, the variation and especially the selection of specific causative verbs in collocations cause problems to French-speaking learners of German. French as a verb-framed language uses one very general verb, namely mettre ‘to put’, to express placement. But teaching manuals for German (E.g. Aufderstraße et al. 1992, 2002 and 2005) do not offer sufficient explanations or aids for the learning of these verbs. The aim of the presentation is threefold: 1. Starting from examples collected in the German DWDS, the analysis first describes the conceptual and semantic variation of the placement verbs. 2. It then focuses on the collocational uses of the 3 most common causative verbs in German (stellen, setzen and liegen) and describes the variety with these verbs. 3. Finally, it develops some teaching strategies for the selection of a specific causative verb in the collocations.