The Case for Caseless Prepositional Constructions with voller in German

Abstract

In this article I will focus on the German deadjectival quasi-preposition voller ‘full of’, which appears to occur with genitive, dative, accusative and even nominative argument forms, e.g.: eine Stadt voller Kindergen? ‘a city full of children’, eine Badewanne voller Wasserdat? ‘a tub full of water’, ein Koffer voller böse Gräuelacc? ‘a suitcase full of evil horrors’, Menschen voller Aberglaubenom? ‘people full of superstition’. Using the largest sample of corpus examples to date, normative dictionaries, and native speakers’ forum discussions on the subject, I will defend an analysis of constructions involving voller as prepositional constructions without an unambiguous case assignment. Overt case in specific environments is determined not by the head but by the argument’s morphosyntax, including the properties of number, gender, morphological class and the presence of attributive adjectives. Inconvenient forms will be shown to be systematically avoided and replaced by alternative constructions. I describe a unification based, constructional approach with underspecified case assignment to capture the data using the formalism of Sign-Based Construction Grammar (SBCG).