34.981, Books: Encyclopaedia of German diatheses: Cysouw

Tue Mar 21 23:00:58 UTC 2023

LINGUIST List: Vol-34-981. Tue Mar 21 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.981, Books: Encyclopaedia of German diatheses: Cysouw

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Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2023 23:00:36
From: Sebastian Nordhoff [sebastian.nordhoff at langsci-press.org]
Subject: Encyclopaedia of German diatheses: Cysouw

Title: Encyclopaedia of German diatheses 
Publication Year: 2023 
Publisher: Language Science Press
	   http://langsci-press.org

Book URL: https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/374 

Author: Michael Cysouw

Electronic: ISBN:  978396110407 Pages: 663 Price: Europe EURO 0 Comment: Open Access

Abstract:

Diathesis ("valency alternation") is a sentence structure that reshapes the
roles of a verb. The prototypical example of such a diathesis is the
well-known passive. However, there are very many other such role-remappings,
like antipassives, applicatives, causatives, etc.

This book presents an encyclopaedic survey of diathesis in German. The
objective is to catalogue all diatheses that exist in this language. Currently
almost 250 different German diatheses are described in this book, some highly
productive, some only attested for a handful of verbs. The main goal of this
book is to present this wealth of grammatical possibility in a unified manner,
while at the same time attempting to classify and organise this diversity. A
summary of the about 80 most prominent diatheses is also provided, including
many newly-minted German names, because most these diatheses did not have a
German name yet.

It might come as a surprise that there are so many different diatheses in
German, but my impression is that in this respect German is no exception among
the world's languages. I expect that all languages have a similar abundance of
different ways in which to construe a sentence around a lexical predicate. In
a sense, a diathesis allows for the expression of a distinct perspective on
the event described, something that is arguably a common desire of any
language user.

Except for diathesis this book also aims to completely catalogue its
counterpart: epithesis. An epithesis is a derived sentence structure in which
the marking of the verb roles remains constant. Basically, these are the
grammaticalised constructions expressing tense-aspect-mood-evidentiality in
German. The list of major epitheses is also quite long (about 40
constructions), but it is quite a bit smaller than the list of major diatheses
(about 80 constructions). This indicates that from a purely grammatical
perspective, diathesis ("grammatical voice") is about a two-times more
elaborate topic than epithesis ("tense-aspect-mood marking") in German.

Linguistic Field(s): Morphology
                     Syntax

Subject Language(s): English (eng)
                     German (deu)

Written In: English  (eng)

See this book announcement on our website: 
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/books/get-book.cfm?BookID=169453

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