Cover not available
Part of
Language Change at the Interfaces: Intrasentential and intersentential phenomena
Edited by Nicholas Catasso, Marco Coniglio and Chiara De Bastiani
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 275] 2022
► pp. 165–188

Gehen as a new auxiliary in German

| University of Göttingen
| University of Göttingen
| University of Göttingen
| University of Göttingen

This paper aims to investigate the so-called gehen+infinitive construction in German, in which an inflected form of the (movement) verb gehen ‘go’ is combined with the infinitive of another main verb and, thus, seems to behave like an auxiliary syntactically. Supported by two questionnaire studies, we will argue that (i) this construction undergoes a currently observable grammaticalization process, and that (ii) it is generally used to encode an aspectual reading, namely ingressivity. Finally, we provide a proposal for the diachronic development of the gehen+infinitive construction, arguing for a transition from a biclausal structure to a monoclausal one, and discuss the consequence of this shift at the syntax-semantics-interface.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background: The grammaticalization of gehen in German
    • 2.1Comparative observations about the origin and grammaticalization processes of new auxiliaries
    • 2.2The case of German gehen
  • 3.Experiments
    • 3.1Experiment 1
      • 3.1.1Design and materials
      • 3.1.2Participants
      • 3.1.3Predictions
      • 3.1.4Procedure
      • 3.1.5Data analysis
      • 3.1.6Results
    • 3.2Experiment 2
      • 3.2.1Design and materials
      • 3.2.2Participants
      • 3.2.3Predictions
      • 3.2.4Procedure
      • 3.2.5Results
    • 3.3General discussion
  • 4.Theoretical interpretation
  • 5.Summary
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 21 April 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.275.05pau
References (37)
Bech, Gunnar
1955 Studien über das deutsche Verbum Infinitum. Kopenhagen: E. Munksgaard.Google Scholar
Botne, Robert
2006 Motion, time, and tense: On the grammaticalization of come and go to future markers in Bantu. Studies in African Linguistics 35(2): 127–188. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bybee, Joan & Pagliuca, William
1985 Cross-linguistic comparison and the development of grammatical meaning. In Historical Semantics – Historical Word Formation, Jacek Fisiak (ed), 59–83. Berlin: De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bybee, Joan and Pagliuca, William
1988 The evolution of future meaning. In Papers from the 7th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Anna Giacalone Ramat, Onofrio Carruba & Giuliano Bernini (eds.), 109–122. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cardinaletti, Anna & Giusti, Giuliana
2001 “Semi-lexical” motion verbs in Romance and Germanic. In Semi-lexical Categories, Norbert Corver & Henk van Riemsdijk (eds), 371–414. Berlin: De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cinque, Guglielmo
2006 Restructuring and Functional Heads. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Claudi, Ulrike & Heine, Bernd
1986 On the metaphorical base of grammar. Studies in Language 10(2): 297–335. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Croissant, Yves
2020 Estimation of random utility models in R: The mlogit package. Journal of Statistical Software 95(11): 1–41. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Demske, Ulrike
2020 Zur Grammatikalisierung von gehen im Deutschen. Forum Japanisch-Germanistischer Sprachforschung 2: 9–42.Google Scholar
Dowty, David
1991 Thematic roles and argument selection. Language 67(3): 547–619. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Erb, Marie Christine
2001 Finite Auxiliaries in German. PhD dissertation, Tilburg University.
Evers, Arnold
1975 The Distributional Cycle in German and Dutch. PhD dissertation, University of Utrecht.
Fanselow, Gisbert
1989 Coherent infinitives in German: Restructuring vs. IP-Complementation. In Syntactic Phrase Structure Phenomena in Noun Phrases and Sentences, Christa Bhatt, Elisabeth Löbel & Claudia Maria Schmidt (eds), 1–16. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fischer, Annette
2001 Diachronie und Synchronie von auxiliarem tun im Deutschen. In Zur Verbmorphologie in germanischen Sprachen, Sheila Watts, Jonathan West & Hans-Joachim Solms (eds), 137–154. Tübingen: Niemeyer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Flick, Johanna & Kuhmichel, Katrin
2013 Der am-Progressiv in Dialekt und Standardsprache. In Sprachwandel im Neuhochdeutschen, Petra M. Vogel (ed), 52–76. Berlin: De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gárgyán, Gabriella
2010 Der am-Progressiv im heutigen Deutsch. Neue Erkenntnisse mit besonderer Hinsicht auf die Sprachgeschichte, die Aspektualität und den kontrastiven Vergleich mit dem Ungarischen. PhD dissertation, University of Szeged.
Gärtner, Hans-Martin & Steinbach, Markus
1994 Economy, verb second, and the SVO-SOV distinction. Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 53: 1–59.Google Scholar
Haegeman, Liliane & van Riemsdijk, Henk
1986 Verb projection raising, scope, and the typology of rules affecting verbs. Linguistic Inquiry 17: 417–466.Google Scholar
Haider, Hubert
1993 Deutsche Syntax – Generativ. Vorstudien zur Theorie einer Projektiven Grammatik. Tübingen: Narr.Google Scholar
Heine, Bernd & Kuteva, Tania
2002 World Lexicon of Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Heine, Bernd
1993 Auxiliaries. Cognitive Forces and Grammaticalization. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Heine, Bernd, Claudi, Ulrike & Hünnemeyer, Friederike
1991 Grammaticalization. A Conceptual Framework. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Jackendoff, Ray
1990 Semantic Structures. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Kaye, Steven
2009 Grammaticalization and Future Reference in the Italic/Romance Verb. M.Phil. dissertation, Oxford University.
Krug, Manfred
2011 Auxiliaries and grammaticalization. In Oxford handbook of grammaticalization, Bernd Heine & Heiko Narrog (eds), 547–558. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Labov, William
2001 Principles of Linguistic Change. Volume 2: Social Factors. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Lehmann, Christian
2015 Thoughts on Grammaticalization. Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Luke, Steven G.
2017 Evaluating significance in linear mixed-effects models in R. Behavior Research Methods 49(4): 1494–1502. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pérez, Aveline
1990 Time in motion: Grammaticalisation of the be going to construction in English. La Trobe working papers in linguistics 3(4): 49–64.Google Scholar
Perlmutter, David
1978 Impersonal passives and the unaccusative hypothesis. Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (BLS 4): 157–190. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ramelli, Christian
2015 Die Rheinische Verlaufsform im rheinfränkischen Dialekt. PhD dissertation, University of Potsdam.
R Core Team
2021 R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Vienna, Austria.Google Scholar
Singmann, Henrik, Bolker, Ben, Westfall, Jake, Aust, Frederik & Ben-Shachar, Mattan S.
2021 afex: Analysis of Factorial Experiments. [URL]
Stechow, Arnim von & Sternefeld, Wolfgang
1988 Bausteine Syntaktischen Wissens. Ein Lehrbuch der Generativen Grammatik. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sweetser, Eve Eliot
1987 Metaphorical models of thought and speech: A comparison of historical directions and metaphorical mappings in the two domains. Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (BLS 13): 446–459. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Weber, Thilo
2018 An OT analysis of do-support across varieties of German. The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 21(1): 75–129. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wurmbrand, Susanne
2001 Infinitives: Restructuring and Clause Structure. Berlin: De Gruyter.Google Scholar