A semantic approach to auxiliary selection with German verbs of motion. An empirical study

Abstract

German manner-of-motion verbs can take both haben ‘have’ and sein ‘be’ as perfect auxiliaries. It has recently been proposed that, in these cases, auxiliary selection is determined by the feature [locomotion], where [+locomotion] triggers sein ‘be’ and [-locomotion] triggers haben ‘have’ (Randall 2007). In this paper, we explore the notion of locomotion from an empirical semantic perspective. We report the results of an acceptability judgment task and we show that some manner-of-motion verbs are more typically associated with [+locomotion] than others depending on the prominence of directionality involved in verb semantics. However, we argue that locomotion is not a property of verbs themselves but rather a property of constructions (Goldberg 1995), which impose a specific semantic construal on the verbs.

Keywords

• auxiliary selection
• German
• manner-of-motion verbs
• semantics
• locomotion