Die vorliegende Studie stellt aktuelle Tendenzen in der germanistischen Sprachdidaktik dar und unterscheidet zwischen drei Ansätzen: Plausibilitätsdidaktiken entwickeln ihre Ansätze auf der Basis von aus Theorien hergeleiteten oder plausiblen, häufig erfahrungsbasierten Evidenzen, empirisch basierte Didaktiken beruhen auf empirischer Evidenz, die häufig durch Methoden der Bildungswissenschaften erhoben werden, und linguistisch orientierte didaktische Ansätze beziehen sich auf Forschungsergebnisse der theoretischen, angewandten und/oder empirischen Sprachwissenschaft. Anhand von sogenannten Paralleltexten (Texten, die hinsichtlich ihres Verständlichkeitsgrads identisch sind) wird für ein Zusammenspiel dieser drei Ansätze argumentiert.

Conceptually, there are good reasons to assume that syntax and morphology form a single grammar module. Implementing this idea in a grammar model is problematic, however, because syntactic and morphological structures appear to require different kinds of rules. By distinguishing the morphosyntactic and phonological components of a structure, however, it becomes possible to describe syntactic and morphological structures in a unified model. An affix, for example, is syntactically no different from a free morph. The fact that it is a bound morpheme can be described as a fact about the phonological form of the affix by applying principles adopted from prosodic morphology. As it turns out, these principles can also be applied to syntactic structures, shedding some light onto phenomena that are otherwise difficult to account for syntactically.

Nowadays it is widely believed that the so-called recipient passive in German is a real syntactic passive. In this article, however, it is argued that the recipient passive in German should be analyzed in the same way as the construction with have and a past participle in English, especially on the basis of the considerations in McIntyre (2005, 2006). According to this analysis, the synonymous relationship between recipient passives and corresponding active sentences with a dative argument results from the meaning that the verbs bekommen/kriegen and the dative argument have in common and that is represented by an applicative head. Hence, the recipient passive in German is a type of applicative construction. It is also pointed out that the verbs bekommen/kriegen lost their achievementhood in the recipient passive and the semantics of these verbs is thus the same as that of have in English. Furthermore, it is shown that the recipient passive in German is an 'Ausweichkonstruktion' (= replacement construction) in the sense of Kirchner (1952) and that the recipient passive often contributes to the topic continuity in discourse.