Deriving the meaning of light verb constructions – a frame account of German stehen ‘stand’

In this paper, we present a case study of German light verb constructions (LVCs) with the posture verbstehen‘stand’ which builds on the insights of different works dealing with non-light uses of posture verbs. Starting from the literal uses of posture verbs, we will show how the meaning components of these uses are systematically exploited in the different interpretational patterns ofstehenLVCs. In particular, we will discuss the effect of the choice of the preposition and how it interacts with the meaning of the light verb and the noun. Since the variant of frame semantics (e.g., Barsalou 1992; Petersen 2007, 2015) adopted in our analysis allows for a uniform representation of nouns, verbs and prepositions, we can make explicit reference to all the relevant meaning components of light verb constructions in a single format.