Geschehensnominalprädikate. Linguistisches Konzept, Parameter und Klassifizierung

The topic of nominal predicates depicting events has long been neglected in German linguistics. The present article gives a syntactic and semantic definition of the supporting verb constructions with nominal predicates depicting events, e.g. Das Erdbeben dauerte einige Stunden ‘The earthquake lasted a number of hours’ and Eine tiefe Wandlung hatte sich in ihm vollzogen, ‘A deep transformation has taken place in him’. From our perspective, supporting verb constructions with nominal predicates depicting events are simple sentences whose syntactic and semantic core is the word connection Sv + N, which we call “collocation”. Nominal predicates depicting events, which can be nominalisations or simple nouns, arise in the canonical position of the subject. The constructions examined here are defined by the parameters of time, place, cause and witness, which occur as facultative complements in simple sentences. Events occur in three main object classes, <accidental>, <created> and <cyclical> events, and further object classes forming semantic descriptors are classifiable, whereby the suggested classification takes into consideration the fact that the supporting verb structures select certain argument ranges in each case.