Sōþes ne wanda. The Avoidance is Separation Metaphor in West-Germanic Argument Structure

Abstract

Abstract In this paper I reconstruct two separative argument structure constructions for West Germanic: one involving a genitive of origin and one involving an instrumental in the process of being subsumed under the dative. Although neither genitives nor instrumentals/datives are typically used to refer to literal origins in space in any of the languages under consideration, a number of verbs attested with genitives and instrumentals/datives can be semantically related to each other as expressing different metaphorical extensions from the concept of separation. The fact that the expression of spatial origin itself is not a function of the genitive or the instrumental/dative can be explained diachronically with reference to a common evolutionary scenario in which adpositional phrases replace bare-case constructions in their concrete, spatial functions before they take over their derived, more abstract senses. The alternation between genitives, instrumentals/datives and separative prepositions is best modelled as a constructeme, a schema with various allostructions.