Linguistische Berichte Heft 231

This paper asks to what extent the German bekommen ('get') passive has been grammaticalized. As a lexical verb, bekommen obligatorily requires an accusative object. A corpus study and three experiments (two judgment experiments and a forced-choice selection experiment) assessed whether this requirement is transfered to the bekommen passive, that is, whether dative verbs without an accusative object are excluded from this construction. The corpus study and the three experiments converge on the conclusion that for dative verbs without an accusative object, the bekommen passive is intermediate between fully acceptable and fully unacceptable. This conclusion concurs with the characterization of the bekommen passive as a case of grammaticalization-in-progress.

This paper examines the semantic structure of the Greek verb derivatives in -(i)ázo. At the level of socio-expressive meaning -(i)ázo structures show a coordinative character which is much more different than the denotational structures assumed in the generative linguistic tradition for verb suffixes. To show this, an extra semantic representation is introduced, i.e. the 'socio-expressive tier'. This tier properly restricts the denotational operations so that a base can be selected by a particular suffix.

At a first glance, the topic of ,,comprehensibility“ appears to be a rather simple one: Some texts succeed in presenting a content in a comprehensible way, others do not. Then, why is it that there is still no adequate theory of comprehensibility? As matters stand, this seems to be a case of praxis preceding its own theory. The present article aims at filtering out some characteristics of comprehensible texts from the work of the Swiss law editorial department. In the end, these characteristics turn out to be an effective means to enhance particularly the structure of an insurance contract.