The rise of the prepositional genitive in German—a grammaticalization phenomenon

It is well-known that in German a number of genitive prepositions can be constructed with the dative (e.g. wegen ‘because of’ or während ‘during’). In this paper it will be shown—on the basis of large written corpora—that nonetheless preposition-dependent genitive is extremely vital: in spite of the rules of Standard German, nearly all non-prototypical dative prepositions (such as außer ‘apart from’, entgegen ‘against’, entsprechend ‘corresponding to’, gegenüber ‘opposite’, nahe ‘near’, samt ‘along with’ etc.) and most non-prototypical accusative prepositions (such as ausgenommen ‘excluding’, betreffend ‘concerning’, inbegriffen ‘including’, wider ‘contrary to’ etc.) also occur with a genitive. These synchronic case alternations will be analyzed as the result of diachronic grammaticalization processes: when content words are reanalyzed as (non-prototypical) prepositions, the functional shift from lexical to grammatical meaning is iconically mirrored by a subsequent change in the syntactic environment of the relevant form: genitive prepositions come to govern a “new” dative, dative and accusative prepositions come to govern a “new” genitive.