We argue for a split semantics of German predicative participle constructions, depending on whether or not the formation of the participle involves prefixation with the dedicated morpheme ge-. Against the background of the analysis of participles of German be-prefixed verbs proposed in Pross (2019), and using the licensing of superlative constructions and ung-nominalizations as tests, we show that ge-prefixed participles denote a result relation between a property of an event and an individual. In contrast, be-prefixed participles, like adjectives, denote properties of individuals. We cast the distinction between event properties and individual properties in a compositional semantics of ge-and be-prefixed participles and show how the resulting semantic distinction allows to predict the distinction between target and resultant state participles drawn in Kratzer (2000) without using the questionable immer noch 'still' test.
In this paper, we argue that contemporary approaches of constructionalist syntax in which there is no generative lexicon provide an interface between formal and conceptual semantics with which the gap between formal and conceptual semantics can be bridged. We introduce the framework with the discussion of formal and conceptual aspects of meaning in German spatial denominal pre x-and particle verbs. We then show the representation of both formal and conceptual semantics in the same framework that allows to measure out the relation between formal and conceptual semantics in terms of the distribution of direct objects over verbs and corroborate our proposal with a corpus study.
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