Re: Strong/weak verbs, expanded infinitives and applicatives

Hi!

Carsten Becker <naranoieati@...> writes:
>...
> First off, I never understood what exactly "strong" and
> "weak" means regarding nouns and verbs. It looks like all
> strong verbs were irregular, but a former German teacher of
> mine said this was not the case. So I just wanted to ask.
Strictly speaking, strong verbs are irregular, yes.  But they
are distinguished from irregular verbs in German since the
only thing that's irregular is the stem vowel.  So for knowing
how to conjugate a strong verb, you only need to know which
ablaut class it is in.  Compare:

Regular:
    kochen, er kocht, er kochte, er hat gekocht
    STEM-en    STEM-t    STEM-te        ge-STEM-t

Strong, disregarding vowels:
    lesen      liest     las        hat gelesen
    STEM-en    STEM-t    STEM           ge-STEM-en

    Additional to these endings, you need to know the ablaut sequence.
    That's all.  I think there's only a limited number of possible
    ablaut classes, maybe around seven or so excluding a few variants.
    But since I never had to learn this as an L2, I don't exactly
    know.

Now, for irregular verbs, you'll have to basically learn all forms:
   haben, hat, hatte, gehabt;
   sein, ist, war, gewesen.

The distinction between strong and irregular verbs is sensible because
this cuts down the amount of irregular verbs by orders of magnitude in
German.  This is helpful for learners and for analyses in general.

It is funny that some irregular verbs are now irregular by definition:
they use endings of the regular verbs, but have ablaut.  That's easy,
but still irregular.  Example: 'rennen, rennt, rannte, gerannt'.

> Secondly, I don't know the definition of is the term
> "erweiterter Infinitiv", i.e. "expanded infinitive".
An infinitive with an object or an adjunct or basically
anything but the bare infinitive.

  ...  um zu lesen.           - bare infinitive
  ..., um ein Buch zu lesen.  - extended infinitive
  ..., um im Garten zu lesen. - extended infinitive

This is used for defining when to use a comma, of course.  Dunno about
the reformed rules, however.

> Thirdly, are constructions like "um zu" resp. "for ...ing"
> somehow related to applicatives whatever that is?
Applicatives are verb forms that make an adjunct an argument to the
verb, e.g. direct object.  German has a few:

  Wir sprechen über das Buch.
               \___________/
                adjunct

  Wir besprechen das Buch.
                 \______/
                  object

The meaning is *basically* the same.

So 'besprechen' would be the applicative of 'sprechen über'.

**Henrik