Hilfsverben und Grammatikalisierung: Die fatale Attraktion von geben

Auxiliaries for the expression of voice have been claimed to grammaticalize from four source categories (Haspelmath 1990). In particular, inactive and causative verbs are said to separately give rise to passive morphology. This paper will be devoted to the grammaticalization of German passive auxiliaries. While the grammaticalization of the fientive verb werden has received much attention, a very interesting instance of passive formation out of causatives usually goes unnoticed: geben as a passive auxiliary in the Middle-Rhine dialects. It goes back to a causative meaning extension observed in the 16th century, which is a fertile seed-bed of future developments. On the one hand, it gave rise to the presentativeexistential construction by way of a conversational implicature, according to which the creation of a new entity implies its existence. A similar conversational implicature explains the development, on the other hand, of a fientive meaning, because the coming into existence of some properties of an entity can be taken to imply that it has acquired such properties. Thereafter, geben spread to the functional space occupied in Standard German by werden. The case of geben shows that different source channels for passive morphology can in fact cross each other.