German causative events with placement verbs

Several studies have described the semantic uses of German posture verbs, but only few have dealt with German placement verbs. The present study wants to make up for this gap. Starting from a collection of examples from the core corpora of the Digitales Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache (DWDS) and some former studies on posture verbs, it first describes the variety of the most common German placement verbs stellen (‘to put upright’), legen (‘to lay down’), setzen (‘to set’) and stecken (‘to stick’). Posture and placement verbs are used in different constructions, which in the framework of Goldberg’s (1995; 2006) Construction Grammar are semantically and syntactically related to each other by so-called inheritance links. Placement verbs are used in caused motion constructions, whereas posture verbs appear in intransitive motion constructions. This model allows to describe both types of constructions and their instantiations with the corresponding verbs in parallel, which is a more integrative approach. In the second part, the article further adopts a cross-linguistic and typological perspective and focuses on possible difficulties encountered by French speakers when learning German placement verbs. But their description in larger sequences like constructions and in parallel with the semantic use of posture verbs allows for a more efficient learning. Additionally, the learning process can be fostered by exercises based on ‘embodiment’. The paper makes a few suggestions for a teaching methodology based on such an approach