German future constructions - past and present: A corpus-based perspective

德国未来的构建——过去和现在：基于语料库的视角

• 批准号: 461542742
• 负责人: Professor Dr. Stefan Hartmann
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Abteilung I: Lehrstuhl für Germanistische Sprachwissenschaft
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Grants
• 资助国家: 德国
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/461542742?language=en
• 关键词: German; future; constructions; past; present

This project addresses the question of how speakers of present-day German refer to future events and how the conventions for future reference have changed over the past centuries. To this end, a corpus-based approach is used, i.e. we take authentic data into account, using a number of different resources, some of which have become available only recently. The project can be divided into two broad areas: a) From a historical perspective, we investigate how the future construction werden ‘become’ + infinitive (e.g. “ich werde morgen nach Hamburg fahren” ‘I will go to Hamburg tomorrow’) developed and which other constructions can be considered predecessors or competitors of this pattern. For example, it is often assumed that modal verb constructions, especially sollen ‘shall’ + Infinitive, were used for future reference in earlier stages of German as well and that they could play a role in the grammaticalization of werden + infinitive as they might have served as analogical templates. In addition, werden + present participle is often discussed as a potential predecessor (“es wird regnend” lit. ‘it becomes raining’). This project approaches the highly controversial question of how these different constructions relate to each other with a data-driven approach. We extract all instances of all relevant constructions from the newly available reference corpora of historical stages of German and annotate them for semantic and syntactic criteria. By doing so, we can assess to what degree each construction is actually used for future reference, which of the numerous factors that have been proposed in the literature actually play a role in language users' choice of constructions, and how these factors interact with each other. b) From a synchronic perspective, we investigate which factors drive the choice between the two most important possibilities to express future reference in present-day German, namely the construction werden + infinitive on the one hand and the so-called futurate present (e.g. "ich gehe morgen ins Kino", lit. ‘I go to the cinema tomorrow’) on the other. We assume that register and text type (e.g. conceptually more oral vs. written communication) as well as semantic as well as syntactic factors play a role. Semantic factors include temporal distance, syntactic ones the occurrence of other constructions with werden ‘become’ in the immediate context or the occurrence in negated or interrogative contexts. Taken together, these studies about historical and present-day conventions of future reference in German can help to clarify a number of open questions that have been discussed extensively from a theoretical perspective in the previous literature but that can now be approached on the basis of a substantial amount of empirical data for the first time.

这个项目解决的问题，今天的德语发言人是如何指未来的事件，以及如何为未来参考的公约已经改变了过去几个世纪。为此，我们使用了基于语料库的方法，即我们考虑到真实数据，使用许多不同的资源，其中一些资源最近才可用。这个项目可以分为两个大的领域：a）从历史的角度来看，我们调查未来结构韦尔登“become”+不定式（例如“ich werde morgen nach Hamburg fahren”“I will go to Hamburg tomorrow”）是如何发展的，以及哪些其他结构可以被认为是这个模式的前身或竞争者。例如，人们通常认为情态动词结构，特别是sollen 'shall' +不定式，在德语的早期阶段也被用于将来参考，它们可能在韦尔登+不定式的语法化中发挥作用，因为它们可能充当类比模板。此外，韦尔登+现在分词经常被讨论为一个潜在的前身（“es wird regnend”lit.“it becomes raining”）。该项目采用数据驱动的方法来解决这些不同结构如何相互关联的高度争议性问题。我们提取所有相关的建设，从新可用的参考语料库的历史阶段的德语和注释它们的语义和句法标准的所有实例。通过这样做，我们可以评估每个构式在多大程度上实际上用于将来的参考，在文献中提出的众多因素中，哪些因素实际上对语言使用者选择构式起作用，以及这些因素如何相互作用。B）从共时的角度，我们考察了是什么因素促使人们在现在德语中表达将来时所指的两种最重要的可能性之间做出选择，即一方面是结构韦尔登+不定式，另一方面是所谓的将来现在（例如“ich gehe morgen ins Kino”，lit.“I go to the cinema tomorrow”）。我们假设语域和文本类型（例如，概念上更多的口头与书面交流）以及语义和句法因素发挥作用。语义因素包括时间距离、句法因素、其他含有韦尔登的构式在直接语境中的出现、否定或疑问语境中的出现。综上所述，这些关于德语未来参考的历史和当今惯例的研究可以帮助澄清一些悬而未决的问题，这些问题在以前的文献中已经从理论角度进行了广泛的讨论，但现在可以第一次在大量的经验数据的基础上进行探讨。