Kontinuativkonstruktionen im Italienischen und Deutschen : Ein korpusbasierter Sprachvergleich

The subject of this paper are verbal constructions such as: “Er ließ Kaffee und Kuchen stehen“, „Der Wagen blieb im Kreuzungsbereich stehen“ und "Mia figlia continua a fumare; "Mio marito restava a lavorare fino alle 21" in the spoken languages of German and Italian. Their common features are the periphrastic character of the verbal construction and the aspectual-temporal significance. The article presents an analysis of the periphrastic expression of the continuative aspect in German compared to Italian as prototypical marks of continuation, or the middle phase of an event. The typological grammatical character of verbal periphrasis has been a key issue as a special feature of the Romance languages especially within Romance linguistics, yet it has always been the formal aspects and the degrees of grammaticalization of these verbal constructions to be of any academic interest, the pragmatic or functional aspects have been largely neglected. Only recently have there been any approaches to systematically detect analytical verbal constructions for the German language. This article will present an empirical study of the structures described above to subsequently work out their functions in concrete linguistic interactions of the German and Italian languages.