Adjektiv oder Präposition? Das Kategorisierungsproblem in sprachvergleichender Perspektive
In German there are about twenty-five elements (like gemäß, nahe, voll) that seem to be used as a preposition along with their use as an adjective. In former approaches the preposition is interpreted as the product of grammaticalizing (and/or reanalyzing) the adjective. It is argued that the two criteria these approaches rely on, namely change of linear position and change of case government, are insufficient. In this paper, seven criteria for distinguishing adjectives form prepositions in German are put forward. What is most important is that these criteria have to be evaluated on the token level as well as on the level of type and word class/syntactic category. It can be shown that the individual 'adjective-prepositions' as types possess a specific mixture of adjective-like and preposition-like features. On the token level, occurring as part of a postnominal restrictive attribute is indicative for preposition-like status in German. The comparison of German with English and Italian adjective-prepositions (like near, far, due and vicino, lontano) reveals a lot of differences, which counts as evidence for the language-specific nature of word classes. Nevertheless, Lehmanns functional-typological approach uncovers a fundamental functional similarity between complement governing adjectives and prepositions: the primary function of the phrases, i.e., adjective/preposition + complement, is to modify a nominal or a verbal concept, respectively. This insight explains why adjective-prepositions can be found cross-linguistically. The question whether we should propose one type or two types for gemäß and its cognates is of minor importance only.
