Kasusrektion durch das Lexem voll. Kasusvariation, aber kein Genitivschwund.

This paper reports on the results of a corpus study on case variation after the lexeme voll ('full'). It deals with constructions like ( er ist voll revolutionären Bewusstseins 'he is full of revolutionary_gen awareness_gen' vs. er ist voll revolutionärem Bewusstsein 'he is full of revolutionary_dat awareness_dat'). Many reference grammars of German claim that voll ('full') governs the genitive as well as the dative and that in current language use the dative increasingly replaces the genitive. Based on an electronic corpus of the German daily newspaper Der Tagesspiegel, the issues of the extent of the case variation after voll ('full') and the government properties of this lexeme are addressed. The data analysis reveals that case variation only occurs when the governed NP is in singular. Here, the rate of dative (62%) is higher than that of genitive (38%). In the plural condition, however, the data analysis shows no case variation. Here, voll ('full') exclusively governs the genitive. Hence, the findings do not support the claim of a general genitive loss after voll ('full'). It is argued that the discrepancy between the singular and the plural conditions can be considered as a syntactically motivated case variation. The findings are mainly discussed in the context of Gallmann's (1996) approach of the syntactically determinate case ending omission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]