Accompaniment by participation: The interpretation of 'mit' as a free particle in German

Abstract

This paper is about the interpretation of free mit ‘with’ in German as exemplified by 'Ben bastelt mit am Rad' (lit. Ben tinkers with with the bike) ‘Ben is participating in a tinkering with the bike’ and 'Ben ist mit der größte' (lit. Ben is with the tallest) ‘Ben belongs to the tallest people’. It provides a uniform compositional semantics according to which free 'mit' distributes its target predication over the explicit subject and implicit alternatives in such a way that the subject is said to accompany an implicit host situation by participation. The proposal thus argues against previous approaches that treat free 'mit' as a focus particle or an elliptical PP and that consider its combination with the superlative a separate construction. The evidence is drawn from a wide range of semantic-pragmatic properties not disclosed before: free 'mit' is insensitive to focus and projection, while it introduces a distinction between a discourse-transparent accompaniment by the subject referent and discourse-opaque alternatives. Most crucially, free 'mit' is only compatible with predication types that support an extension by accompaniment. While the analysis zooms in on a special lexeme, it also advances more general topics: the opposition between constructional and compositional approaches to the constitution of meaning, accompaniment relations as a vital diagnostic for the ontological foundation of predication types, and the intriguing behavior of the superlative in distributional contexts.

Keywords

• compositional semantics
• natural language ontology
• particles
• states and events
• superlative