Adverbiale Partizipialkonstruktionen im Deutschen mit dem Partizip 1 als Kern

Abstract

The syntax and semantics of adverbial present participle constructions in German This article deals with the syntax and semantics of adverbial present participle constructions (PPC) in German. Based on a corpus study of 400 constructions of this type, we show that PPC can have a wide variety of adverbial readings, ranging from event-expanding and event-specifying to sentence and speechact adverbial interpretations. We argue that the interpretation of a PPC is not only dependent on the matrix context in which it occurs, but is also determined by its adjunction site in the so-called middle field. Furthermore, we present evidence that these constructions can be analysed as Small Clauses with a CP structure and a phonetically empty PRO subject. Relying on the criteria for obligatory control (OC) presented in Landau (2013), we show that this PRO subject is usually obligatorily controlled and that this control relation can be syntactically accounted for using an OC-as-Agree analysis.