Bleiben bleibt bleiben

Abstract

It has often been observed that German bleiben 'remain' has a so-called BECOME-reading in the context of an infinitive of a positional verb, i. e. a reading that is regularly associated with its dual werden 'become'. At first glance it looks as if a bleiben + infinitive construction can either refer to a stative situation or to a situation involving a change of state. Up to now two ways of resolving the problem of the bleiben ambiguity have been proposed: the first captures the ambiguity in terms of a reinterpretation process (Steinitz 2000), the second assumes a homonymy of the copula bleiben (Schlucker 2003). I will argue that neither a mechanism of reinterpretation nor the assumption of two copula verbs bleiben with different situational arguments capture the facts as they are. I assume that German bleiben is not ambiguous at all but always involves the operator REMAIN in its semantic representation. The associated change of state is an inference that is drawn only if the following condition is met: There must be a preceding situation which differs from the situation bleiben refers to only in the presence of movement. This condition must be fulfilled in order to meet the presuppositional requirements of bleiben. The proposed analysis allows us to keep the semantics simple, and furthermore gives an explanation of why the so-called BECOME-reading shows up only in the context of certain infinitives of positional verbs - a fact for which no explanation has been offered so far.