Open Access

Mojmír Muzikant, Roland Wagner

• Der Beitrag ist im Rahmen der Ausarbeitung eines derivationellen Valenzlexikons entstanden, in dem Valenzträger des Deutschen und Tschechischen für verschiedene kategoriale Kontexte erfasst werden sollen. Anhand des Musterlemmas für abfallen wird diskutiert, welche Kriterien zur Festlegung von zentralen und peripheren Varianten des jeweiligen Lexems geeignet sind und welche linguistischen Besonderheiten an der Peripherie des genannten Lexems auftreten.
• In the lexicological literature, several criteria have been suggested to distinguish between central and peripheral meanings of a lexical unit. We apply these criteria to authentic language material collected during work on a derivational valency dictionary at the Pedagogical faculty of Masaryk University in order to determine whether unambiguous results can be achieved. In the paper, we show that in the case of abfallen 'to drop down', the exclusive application of criteria based on frequency would lead to unintuitive results. The basic meaning of abfallen neither is the most frequent meaning of the verb in our corpus nor is its frequency constant across verbal and nominal contexts. The results can be improved if additional criteria are taken into consideration. It turns out, that the subunits of the lexeme abfallen which we consider on intuitive grounds as peripheral show non-canonical grammatical behaviour as to the structure of their valency frames and the realization of their valency potential. In addition, the set of translational equivalents documented in the parallel corpus [InterCorp] is more fragmentised than it is the case with the central subunits of the lexeme. We take both observations as evidence for the peripheral status of the subunits under consideration.