Jacob Maché: Towards a compositional analysis of verbless directives in German

This talk dealt with verbless directives in German consisting of a directive PP and a 'mit'-PP ('with'). The main claim was that a compositional analysis would be possible: first of all, the PP+'mit'+NP pattern is not restricted to directive meaning, it can be found with 'wh'-morphology and embedded under a small class of predicates. The impossibility of declarative illocutionary force is due to the lack of finiteness. Second, it turned out that directive PPs are indeed predicates and therefore PP+'mit'+NP pattern are part of a more general phenomenon particular to all types of non-finite predicates. Third, it seems that the 'mit'-PP could be analysed as a manifestation of the THEME argument with structural case in the distribution of a directive phrase. paper not submitted, since it will appear elsewhere

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