Linguistische Berichte Heft 284

This article examines the question of whether bis, ab, von and seit should be regarded as atypi-cal prepositions. The investigation is based on the nature of their syntactic complement. The atypical syntactic behaviour of bis is due to the fact that it cannot have a nominal group with an article as a complement, e. g. *bis den Fluss, *bis das nächste Wochenende. The typical complement of bis is an adverbial; in such cases, bis does not exercise case regency (accusa-tive). Von, ab, seit are typical dative prepositions. They also have syntactic features in common with bis. In this paper on the syntactic behaviour of the four lexemes, a new classification of them is proposed on the basis of the new word class pre-adverb.

This paper investigates the occurrence of somatic idioms in German across diverse text genres, including literary works, academic texts, functional writings and journalistic articles, utilizing corpus data from the Digital Dictionary of the German Language (DWDS). The aim is to discern the specific intentions pursued by text producers through the deployment of idioms, elucidating the communicative functions they fulfill. Employing a pragmatic approach, this corpus study delves into both the stylistic-pragmatic and text-forming characteristics of idioms. The analysis reveals that somatic idioms manifest in both nominal and modified forms, con-currently fulfilling distinct functions within specific contexts. The study’s results not only reveal the specific functions of somatic idioms in different text genres but also enable a com-parative approach to highlight similarities and differences. This serves to improve the under-standing of somatic idioms in text analysis and to lay a basis for future research in this domain.