An integrative model for the analysis of taxis in German prepositional-deverbative constructions

An integrative model, combining existing fragmented linguistic descriptions, was developed for analyzing prepositional-deverbative constructions (PDC) in modern German as a core means of expressing taxis relations. The four-level analytical framework was consistently implemented using a corpus of selected linguistic data. Its explanatory value was demonstrated based on a representative sample of utterances containing prepositional deverbatives collected from the Leipzig National Corpus of modern German. This representative sample was analyzed to show how an interaction between the studied levels determines the expression of the taxis relations of simultaneity and non-simultaneity (i.e., to indicate whether actions happen at the same time or at different times). According to the proposed approach, the PDC emerges as a dynamic semantic-syntactic system, the integral meaning of which is formed through a non-linear integration of the following interconnected components: 1) the word-formation level: the degree of verbogenicity of the deverbative; 2) the lexical-aspectual level: the aspectual-actional class semantics of the deverbative; 3) the relational level: the categorical semantics of the prepositional classifier; 4) the contextual-modulation level: the influence of the semantics of the main predicate, determinants, and pragmatic conditions of the discourse.