Zur Aspektualität des modalen Partizips I mit zu in attributiver Stellung (in kontrastiver Sicht)
On the aspectuality of the modal participle I with zu in the attributive position (a contrastive view)

Summary/Abstract: The semantic aspectuality of the German present participle (participle I) is not mentioned in Grammars of German, and in specialized studies it is taken for granted that the aspect of this sort of verbal derivative (e. g. besuchende ‘visiting’) is only imperfective. In Štícha (2009) it is shown that the German attributive participle I can also be used and interpreted in the meaning of the Slavic perfective aspect. In this article, a special attention is paid to the aspectual meaning of the modal usage of the present participle with the free syntactic morpheme zu (zu besuchende ‘to be visited’). Examples of sentences containing this sort of modal attribute are selected from the corpus material (Corpus W - all free accessible corpora - of the Institute for the German Language in Mannheim, Germany) to show that the modal participle must be interpreted as perfective in most of its sentence usages. Some elementary statistics are added to strengthen the arguments.

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