The rise of the prepositional genitive in German – a grammaticalization phenomenon

It is well-known that in German a number of genitive prepositions can be constructed with the dative (e.g. wegen ‘because of’ or während ‘during’). In this paper it will be shown – on the basis of large written corpora – that nonetheless preposition-dependent genitive is extremely vital: in spite of the rules of Standard German, nearly all non-prototypical dative prepositions (such as außer ‘apart from’, entgegen ‘against’, entsprechend ‘corresponding to’, gegenüber ‘opposite’, nahe ‘near’, samt ‘along with’ etc.) and most non-prototypical accusative prepositions (such as ausgenommen ‘excluding’, betreffend ‘concerning’, inbegriffen ‘including’, wider ‘contrary to’ etc.) also occur with a genitive. These synchronic case alternations will be analyzed as the result of diachronic grammaticalization processes: when content words are reanalyzed as (non-prototypical) prepositions, the functional shift from lexical to grammatical meaning is iconically mirrored by a subsequent change in the syntactic environment of the relevant form: genitive prepositions come to govern a “new” dative, dative and accusative prepositions come to govern a “new” genitive