The Grammaticalization Of The Recipient Passive In German

The recipient passive in German consists of bekommen/kriegen/erhalten and a past participle.Bekommen,kriegen and erhalten are auxiliaries.The past participle encompasses mainly ditransititve verbs.The subject of this structure is a recipient.The recipient passive was regarded as a marginal phenomenon for a long time.It was not accepted as a passive form until the 1980s.Relevant research was carried out relatively late.The previous studies focus mainly on its syntactic features.Although an increasing number of studies have been conducted on the grammaticalization and historical development of the recipient passive,they are based on only a small account of examples.No corpus-based research has been carried out about the grammaticalization and its historical development.Therefore,this thesis will focus on the diachronic investigation of the recipient passive in view of grammaticalization and the study of the distribution of the recipient passive in different contexts.In other words,this work tries to give answers to the following questions:1)What is the initial structure of the recipient passive?2)How is the recipient passive generated and spread?3)What is the distribution of the recipient passive in texts with different colloquial characteristics,and what is special about this distribution?In order to answer these questions,this thesis introduces the theories of grammaticalization and corpus linguistics in its theoretical part.Then it introduces the grammatical characteristics and analyzes the initial structures.It ties to describe the grammaticalization of auxiliaries from perspective semantics and pragmatics in order to uncover the oral origin of the structure.In the practical part,this thesis uses historical data from the German corpus(DeReKo)for a diachronic investigation.Historical data come from the German literature articles(1745-1927),the German feminine literature articles(1650-1927)and the philosophy articles(1713-1979).In addition,this work analyzes texts with different colloquial characteristics and studies the distribution and frequency of the recipient passive.Texts with different colloquial characteristics are law articles,newspaper articles and spoken dialogues.The main part of this paper consists of six chapters:The first chapter is an introduction.The motivation,previous studies and the research questions to be solved are introduced.The second chapter is the theoretical framework.The applied theories are introduced:a brief introduction of grammaticalization and corpus linguistics.Afterwards,the form and nature of the recipient passive are briefly introduced.In addition,the hypotheses of the recipient passive's original structure are discussed in detail.The author agrees to the co-predicative structure as the initial structure of the recipient passive.The grammaticalization of the auxiliaries is studied from the perspective semantics.The oral origin of this structure is also discussed.In the fourth chapter,its diachronic distribution,characteristics and areal distribution are investigated.Besides,the relationship between the recipient passive and its presumed original structure is analyzed.In chapter 5,the distribution of the recipient passive in different contexts is investigated.The frequency and features of this structure are also studied.The sixth chapter discusses the limitations of the essay and comes to the following conclusions:The frequency of the recipient passive is low.Although some examples of this passive form exist in previous studies from the 16th century,we can only find examples in the corpus after the second half of the 17th century.This proves that the recipient passive became a standard form before the 19th century.In consideration of the geographic features of authors,the recipient passive was firstly distributed in the dialect region of eastern-central Germany and then in the whole German-speaking region.This indicates that the demand for oral communication is an important factor for the grammaticalization of the recipient passive.The recipient passive is mainly used by authors who also use the speculated original structure.The recipient passive is used more frequently in texts written in colloquial style.The number of examples in written texts currently increases,but still remains low.The recipient passive is a colloquial expression.