Genitive vs. von-PP arguments in German NPs: Grammatical and use conditions

Abstract

In German, NP arguments of nominal heads can be marked either with genitive case or with the preposition von. Although these types of marking are truth-conditionally equivalent, they have distinct contextual distributions, with genitive-marked arguments being associated with speakers who present themselves socially as more educated than von-marked arguments. This paper has a threefold objective. First, we offer a lexicalist account of the von vs. genitive alternation for NP arguments in German, deriving the pool of possible variants. Second, we formulate an extension of the HPSG architecture that allows us to predict the differences in usage preferences in a way that captures a graded notion of register and contextual appropriateness - in the spirit of Varaschin, Machicao y Priemer & Lu (2024). Our extension crucially involves the statement of use-conditional constraints, which associate independently licensed linguistic objects to gradable social meanings. Finally, we propose a corpus methodology to empirically validate hypotheses about social meaning assignments via use-conditional constraints and the principle of social meaning composition, focusing on the interaction between the von vs. genitive alternation and -ung (‘-ment’) nominalisations.