Nominalprädikate und argumentative Funktionen: die ERKLÄRUNG

The primary and secondary categories are considered in pedagogic grammars as prototypical categories and phenomena such as conjunctive, prepositional and adverbial phrases are therefore considered “peripheral” and part of the “conjunction”, “preposition” and “adverb” categories. Focusing on the syntactic and semantic behaviour of the conjunctive phrases which introduce the argumentative function of the Explanation in German like zu dem Zweck+Infs/(dass-Satz), mit dem Ziel+Infs/dass-Satz, in (mit) der Absicht+Infs, mit dem Plan+Infs, mit dem Gedanken+Infs etc., I will show that lexicon offers a large number of conjunctive phrases expressing purposes which are overlooked in scientific and pedagogic grammars as they assume that clauses are prototypically introduced by conjunctions and not by “peripheral phenomena” like conjuctive phrases, which are simply considered fixed expressions. I will also demonstrate that conjunctive phrases cannot be considered as “peripheral phenomena” within the prototypical “conjunction” category because they do not constitute fixed expressions and their semantic head, that is the nominal predicate, occurs as a second degree operator in sentences subject to an elevated number of transformations. Conjunctive phrases are very productive and frequently used by speakers as they are able to modulate purposes on the semantic level and therefore can introduce in texts the argumentative function of the Explanation in many different ways, which better correspond to the speakers communicative intentions. As conjunctive phrases explicitly introduce the argumentative function of the Explanation, they are also meta-argumentative expressions which can be classified with regard to the semantic classes of their nominal predicates.