Die Präadverbien ab, seit, von

In traditional grammars, words are grouped into word classes according to various criteria. Classifications are based on syntactic, morphological and semantic criteria (Glinz 1968; Ehlich 2007, p. 51ff.). Nevertheless, some words are difficult to classify into a category, as consequence of idiosyncratic characteristics, for example ab, seit, von in German. These words can be considered as syntactic “Einzelgänger” (Pasch et al. 2003, p. 584ff.) since they show the syntactic behaviour of prepositions with dative as well as of pre-adverbs. In this paper the aim is to investigate the syntactic behaviour of ab, seit, von as pre-adverbs so that this word class can be included among the canonical word classes (see Duden 2006) on the basis of which the lexical items of the German language can be classified.