Objektwechsel bei Partikelverben im Deutschen : Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung Privativer Verben mit der Partikel aus-

This paper aims to account for what motivates some German particle-verbs with aus- that especially carry the meaning of “removal”. It is observed that these removal verbs indicate that the subject-agent “takes away” or “moves away” the object-patient, and that the object of the sentence with the predicate of that type of verb can be either a “thing that is removed” or a “container that holds the thing to be removed”. This possibility of alternative construal of the sentence is called “object alternation” and has been found in many other languages, and has been a focus of interest for many linguistic researches, above all Levin and Rappaport Hovav (1991). We attempt to analyze what triggers such object alternation in German particle-verb constructions, on the basis of linguistic data collected from German Corpora. Along the way we demonstrate how the alternation is semantically as well as pragmatically motivated