SPECIFICS OF WORD-BUILDING MOTIVATION OF VERBAL UNITS WITH PREVERBAL COMPONENTS WITH SPATIAL SEMANTICS (BASED ON THE GERMAN COLLOQUIAL LEXICON)

Abstract

The author makes an attempt to describe and generalize the motivational relations in colloquial German verbal units with adverbial particles having the meaning of “space" ( ab-, an-, auf-, aus-, ein-, zu-, vor-). Besides, the variants of classifying them according to their motivation degree are given. The detailed analysis of fully “motivated"; partially, highly and fully “demotivated" lexical units is also presented in the article. The formal criterion of the verbal unit differentiation according to the motiva tion degree is the violation of conceptual and lexical-semantic collocations between an adverbial unit and a word stem. Factors both 'obscuring' motivation and contributing to the identification of relations between them are also revealed and described by the author. Special attention is also given to the word-building metaphorization as the main cause of obscuring motivational relations in these verbal units.