PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

The paper reports on the results of a corpus study on case variation after the lexeme voll (‘full’). It deals with constructions like (er ist voll revolutionären Bewusstseins ‚he is full of revolutionarygen awarenessgen’ vs. er ist voll revolutionärem Bewusstsein ‚he is full of revo-lutionarydat awarenessdat’). Many reference grammars of German claim that voll (‘full’) governs the genitive as well as the dative and that in current language use the dative in-creasingly replaces the genitive. Based on an electronic corpus of the German daily news-paper Der Tagesspiegel, the issues of the extent of the case variation after voll (‘full’) and the government properties of this lexeme are addressed. The data analysis reveals that case variation only occurs when the governed NP is in singular. Here, the rate of dative (62%) is higher than that of genitive (38%). In the plural condition, however, the data analysis shows no case variation. Here, voll (‘full’) exclusively governs the genitive. Hence, the findings do not support the claim of a general genitive loss after voll (‘full’). It is ar-gued that the discrepancy between the singular and the plural conditions can be ac-counted for by the markedness properties of the nominal inflection system of German.