Prospective Aspect and Current Relevance: A Case Study of the German Prospective Stehen vor NP Light Verb Construction

Abstract

The paper presents a detailed corpus-based analysis of the German prospective stehen vor NP light verb construction. The starting point of the analysis is the claim that the construction is restricted to change-of-state nouns in the NP-internal position (Fleischhauer & Gamerschlag 2019, Fleischhauer et al. 2019). Based on corpus data, I demonstrate that although the construction shows a strong preference for such nouns, other semantic types of nouns (such as state nouns or process nouns) occur in the construction as well. I argue that process nouns in particular require contextual support to be licensed within the construction. In the paper, I present an analysis of the prospective light verb construction in terms of current relevance. This analysis accounts for the observed preference for change-of-state NP-internal nouns as well as for the need to provide contextual support for process nouns. The notion current relevance is frequently employed in the analysis of the perfect aspect; the current paper represents the first attempt to extend this notion to the prospective aspect.*