German constructions with pleonastic adverbials

De Knop, Sabine [USL-B]

The presentation deals with German pleonastic constructions (Olsen 1996) in the context of Goldberg's (1995, 2006, 2019) Construction Grammar, as illustrated in (1)-(3). (1) Die Mutter setzt das Kind auf das Pferd drauf. The mother sets the child on the horse upon ‘The mother puts the child on the horse.’ (2) Mehr ist ja auch gar nicht drin in so einem Beruf. More is yes also not at all in it in such a profession ‘That's all there is in a job like this.’ (3) Sie laufen bis auf den Berg hinauf. They run up to on the mountain upon ‘They run up to the mountain.’ These constructions are pleonastic, since they contain both a prepositional phrase for the expression of motion towards a goal and a directional adverb duplicating the preposition in the prepositional phrase (compare Berthele 2004; Carroll 2000; McIntyre 2001), thereby expressing directed motion in a redundant way. In a typological perspective, these examples instantiate typical German constructions as the path of motion is preferably expressed with so-called satellites in Germanic languages (Slobin 1996 & 2017; Talmy 2000). Moreover, manner of motion is a prevalent dimension in German expressions of motion events. But the redundant directional adverb has a reinforcing semantic function, such constructions express intensification. With a collection of examples from the ‘Kernkorpus’ of the Digitales Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache (DWDS) the presentation first describes the variety of pleonastic constructions and their instantiations within the framework of Construction Grammar and highlights the assets of this theoretical framework for the description of such examples (e.g. form-meaning pairs, network of related constructions, different degrees of abstraction). It deals more specifically with the constructions’ form (i.e. possible constituents of such constructions, internal structure, alternative structures) and semantics (i.e. anadeictic vs. catadeictic function of the directional adverbs (Ágel 2017), different degrees of intensification (Ziem 2019), etc.). The second part of the presentation presents a contrastive approach and compares the expression of German pleonastic constructions with French equivalents (see also Poitou 2003 and Ullmann 1991). To do so, it looks at possible translations of such pleonastic examples using translation programmes like DeepL or Google Translate. Interestingly, the redundant directional adverbs are simply not translated into French which reinforces the assumption that the pleonastic constructions under study are typical German constructions which have no counterpart in Romance languages. French will use different constructions for the expression of an intensification semantics.