Syntaktische Funktionen und Kasusrollen

Abstract

Sentences normally exhibit a complex meaning and a plain illocution. Both are functions of the phrases of the sentence. The components of a sentence can be retrieved by different means. One option is to start with the primary constituents, nominal phrase and verbal phrase, in terms of traditional grammar subject and predicate. A different way is to refer to valency theory. This approach differentiates between complements and adjuncts. In German the first group is characterised by nouns as heads of phrases, the functions of nouns are indicated by case marking. The second group is prototypically hallmarked by adverbs. But in both groups many different forms occur. The list of complements in German comprises subject, direct and indirect objects, case marked by accusative, dative and genitive, prepositional objects and a set of specialised forms such as directional phrases or concatenations of verbal constructions. Besides common adverbials, special words are to be found, i. e., sentence adverbials and sentence particles. Both types are highly frequent in modern German. - From a universal point of view, on the surface structure of a sentence deep roles - in a generative approach called “theta roles” - become manifest. Case roles are verbalised in different ways according to the means which are available in a specific language. - Analogue to the constituents on the primary level of the sentence, on a secondary layer attributes are found. They are governed by words of the primary level. On the one hand, attributes introduce additional semantic material into the sentence, but on the other hand they lead to more compact structures and make the sentence less explicit. Structurally seen, attributes behave like constituents on a prior level. Recent approaches in linguistics, above all x-bar theory, refer to the structural parallels between all phrases.