Germans are pragmatic… linguistically.

Name: Kelton Jay Hevelone
Course: Semantics (LING3430)
Advisor/Professor: Dr. Zygmunt Frajzyngier
LURA 2021

A couple years ago when I was on my year abroad in Germany, I noticed a specific linguistic form come up time and time again in the conversations I was having with my friends and classmates. Strangely, the multi-word structure was something I had not ever learned in my various German classes throughout the years. It is composed of the verb “to be” (sein); am (an + dem), meaning ‘on the’ or ‘at the’; and a nominalized verb in its infinitive form. In simpler terms, it followed this structure: sein (‘to be’) + am (‘on the’) + Verb. Take the example below from the Kleines Wörterbuch der Verlaufsformen im Deutschen database for an illustration of its use in everyday speech (Engelberg et al., 2013):

(1) Beim    Tanzen                bin                 ich     meist   heftig        am        Flirten.

      at-def   dance.nmlz-inf   cop.pres.1sg   1sg    most    fervently   on-def   flirt.nmlz-inf

     ‘While (at) dancing, I am very actively/fervently flirting.’ 

Linguists and grammarians have labeled this structure as the am-Progressive or die Verlaufsform in the German literature. Until this point, there has been consensus that the form represents an emerging progressive aspect, i.e. a linguistic structure which presents the verb as ‘ongoing’ during a point in time (Duden, 2009). If true, it would function similarly to the ‘be verb-ing’ structure in English, which also bears the title of ‘progressive aspect’ (e.g. I am going, he is running, they are sleeping). Inspired by the work of Frajzyngier et al. (2008) on the English progressive, I break from the linguistic tradition and propose a new analysis for the so-called am-Progressive’s nature in German. 

Rather than being progressive or even aspectual at all, the am-Progressive functions as a pragmatic dependency marker. These markers are linguistic forms which instruct the listener to interpret the sentence at hand in relation to something. The listener must then connect that sentence to some reference point in order to understand its meaning. This reference point can either come from the speakers’ surrounding environment or from the discourse itself between those speakers. Therefore, sentences which use a pragmatic dependency marker complete their meaning within context, being impossible to understand in its absence. 

In Example 1 above, the main verb of the sentence (“bin…am Flirten” – ‘am flirting’) is intended to be interpreted in relation to the locative phrase, beim Tanzen (‘while (at) dancing’). Without this phrase, an absence of context arises because no other part of the sentence can be leveraged for the necessary frame of reference. Either the sentence would have to be interpreted with the discourse up until this point, or it would automatically be interpreted in context of the surrounding environment, i.e. as something that is happening in the present moment. This can be verified by the fact that the sentence would be confusing in the case that (1) there was no preceding discourse context, (2) there is no locative phrase (beim Tanzen) and, (3) the speaker is not actively “flirting” in that moment. Imagine a friend randomly saying after a long pause of no conversation: “I am actively flirting,” while not actually flirting with anyone. The listener, or you, would not know what to interpret that statement with regards to. The am-Progressive is then pragmatically dependent. It requires that something, i.e. some reference point, lest the sentence become utterly nonsensical.  

While the present tense allows for interpretation with the surrounding environment, the past and future do not have this luxury. We, as humans, cannot be physically surrounded by a past or future environment because we only ever experience time in the present moment.  It would follow that a pragmatic dependency marker cannot conclude a discourse in either the past or future tenses, because it would stand in isolation. There is no physical surrounding environment nor discourse context to interpret it with. This is exactly what we find. Notice how the following sentence comes across as ‘incomplete’ if it were to be the last thing a person said:

(2) Ein     Lehrer       war              vor        Kurzem                 am        Reisen.

      indf   teacher.m   cop.pst.3sg   before   short.nmlz-dat.n   on-def   travel.nmlz-inf

       ‘A teacher was recently traveling.’

The natural reaction to this sentence would be an anticipation for more information – information that could be leveraged to interpret the meaning of the sentence. But in a void of subsequent discourse context, there is nothing else available to interpret the sentence with. It exists almost as non-language. Words with missing meaning. Semantically well-formed, but pragmatically desolate. This restriction on the structure’s usage provides additional evidence that the am-Progressive is not in fact a progressive aspectual form, but rather a pragmatic dependency marker. 

I propose then that pragmatic dependency is the nature of the so-called am-Progressive. Perhaps, a more suitable term would be “die Zusammenhangsform” (the interdependency form), since its true character speaks of relation rather than continuance.

Bibliography

Duden Verlag. 2009. Die Grammatik: Unentbehrlich für richtiges Deutsch (8. Auflage). Mannheim: Dudenverlag. Engelberg, Stefan, Stephanie Frink, Svenja König, Peter Meyer & Agata Sokolowski. 2013. Kleines Wörterbuch der Verlaufsformen im Deutschen. Mannheim: Institut für Deutsche Sprache. Available at https://www.owid.de/wb/progdb/start.html. 
Frajzyngier, Zygmunt, with M. Bond, L. Heintzelman, D. Keller, S. Ogihara, and E. Shay. 2008. Towards an understanding of the progressive form in English: The imperative as a heuristic tool. In W. Abraham and E. Leiss (eds.), The Aspect -Modality Interface in Typology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 81-96.