https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110733945-xxx Alexandra N. Lenz Elicitation of Basic PUT&TAKE Verbs – An Experimental Approach Abstract: While previous research has mainly concentrated on the analysis of “specifying” put and take verbs (like e.g. English set, stick, pull or German stel- len ‘cause to stand’, stecken ‘stick’/‘plug’, ziehen ‘pull’), analyses on “basic verbs” (like e.g. English put and take or French mettre ‘put’ and prendre ‘take’) have so far remained a desideratum. In this contribution, we will pursue an experimental approach to basic put and take verbs in German. While German and English share the existence of a basic verb for source-oriented object movements, i.e. take in English and nehmen in German, a basic verb for goal- oriented positional placement – i.e. for putting events – is missing in German, at least in the German standard varieties. Nevertheless, our experiment will show that nonstandard varieties of German provide potential candidates for basic put verbs among which especially the verb geben ‘(lit.) give’ is about to achieve the status of a standard language variant. Keywords: PUT verbs, lexical variation, language production experiment, caused motion construction 1 Introduction This contribution is situated in the area of tension between cognitive semantics and lexically oriented variationist linguistics. Specifically, it deals with the ver- balization of PUT&TAKE actions, i.e. actions in which objects are moved away from and/or towards a place. In the following sections, the analyses focus on the verbs that are used in German within so-called “caused motion construc- tions” (Goldberg 1995) to verbalize PUT&TAKE actions. Herein, we are not inter- ested in the lexical variation of “specifying verbs”, but of basic placement verbs. While Bowerman et al. (2004) provide a standardized experimental setting for the elicitation of specifying placement verbs, which has been tested in many languages (cf. Kopecka and Narasimhan 2012), experimental approaches for the 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 || Alexandra N. Lenz, University of Vienna & Austrian Academy of Sciences, alexandra.lenz@univie.ac.at, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2783-203X