Abstract

This contribution focusses on grammatical peculiarities of German and Luxembourgish connected with the verb geben ‘to give’. It addresses the grammaticalization processes which have been resulted in the existential construction es gibt ‘there is’, the geben-copula, and the passive and conditional auxiliary uses of geben. The paper sets out to collect and pull together scattered research findings which address individual aspects of the phenomena, and further, to document the large number of unresolved issues surrounding the grammatical affinity of geben. Selecting from the latter the question of the historical relationship between the grammaticalized geben-variants, this contribution first reviews the hypotheses extant in the research literature before testing these against the inter- and intrasystemic variation found in German regional varieties (dialects and regional varieties).