„Podolski hat Vertrag bis 2007, egal, ob wir in der Ersten oder Zweiten Liga spielen.“

Abstract

Abstract In German, singular count nouns usually are accompanied by a determiner (cf. Ich habe ein Auto, ‘I have a car’ vs. *Ich habe Auto, ‘I have car’). In recent years, however, the singular count noun Vertrag (‘contract’) is frequently used without a determiner, as in Er hat Vertrag bis 2013 (‘He has contract until 2013’). Although there is some doubt, intuitively, whether or not this construction is grammatically acceptable to native speakers, it definitely exists in today’s German. In this contribution, we examine the in-between status of the Vertrag+haben-construction in German in more detail. We try to find an answer to the following question: How can we explain that Vertrag haben, on the one hand, is less acceptable than the regular Hunger haben (‘be hungry’ [‘have hunger’]) but, on the other hand, is much more acceptable than *Auto haben (‘have car’)? In a diachronic corpus study on (Er) hat Vertrag, we show, first, that this construction is used in German newspaper texts since 1990 with increasing frequency. Then, in a short survey of the general distribution of determinerless count nouns in German, we show that Vertrag haben does not fall under one of the established classes of determinerless constructions in German. Against this background, we take a contrastive look at Swedish, which allows for a great variety of determinerless constructions (e. g., Han har bil ‘He has car’). More specifically, we discuss morpho-syntactic, semantic and information structural properties of Swedish determinerless constructions. Some of these characteristics turn out to be similar for Vertrag haben. The contrastive view leads us to the more general assumption that Vertrag haben is marked because of lacking morpho-syntactic licensing, in contrast to the relevant Swedish constructions. As an account of the problem of how Vertrag haben could achieve the status of a German construction to begin with, we propose that it is the semantic noun class of Vertrag, which we define as abstract, but countable noun, which contributes to the licensing of the construction.