Happening Verbs in the Hypotaxis. A Contrastive Analysis German-Bulgarian

Authors:

Pages: 237-249
DOI: https://doi.org/10.54664/TGTV3945

Abstract:

The article examines the hypotaxis of three verbs in present-day German: geschehen, passieren, vorkommen and their Bulgarian equivalent slučva se/sluči se. In a corpus-based analysis it is argued that the propositional subject of these verbs can be coded not only as a dass-/če-clause but also as a zu-Infinitiv and as a da-clause, respectively, both latter forms then have a generalizing semantics. Happening verbs should therefore be considered as a particular class of implicative verbs allowing such a generalization. In contrast to the factive verbs, where the zu-Infinitiv and the da-clause are also profiled for the generalization of states of affairs, the generalization by happening verbs is restricted to the characteristic “fact, iterated”. The analysis reveals that differences in the hypotaxis of factive and implicative verbs are predetermined by their semantics.

Keywords:

German and Bulgarian happening verbs; implicative verbs; subject clause; zu-Infinitiv; da-Satz; generalizing semantics

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