Syntaktische und semantische Merkmale von Geschehensnominalprädikaten

The subject area of constructions with event predicative nouns, such as Die Besetzung von Berlin erfolgte gleich nach der Kapitulation and Die Katastrophe geschah in Nordamerika, is one that has not yet been tackled in German linguistics. In the panorama of research into Funktionsverbgefüge, where other semantic classes are described in detail, descriptions of the afore-mentioned phenomena are absent. In this paper, constructions with event predicative nouns are defined on both a syntactic and semantic level. Events take place in time and space and do not have, by definition, an agent – or at least they are represented in the sentence as such when actualized by a semantically congruent support verb. Event predicative nouns, which can be either non-derivative or nominal, occur in the canonical position of the subject. Such nouns can be classed into the following three main event categories – “casual-e”, “created-e”, “reoccurring-e” - and select locative and temporal phrases which are not adjuncts. In the case of nominals, converted verbs which have the aspect of the base also have an argument structure, whereas result nominals do not have such a structure. As a final point, derivative nouns which have the aspect and argument structure of the base, have as a consequence semantic links and belong to the same semantic field.