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In German, singular count nouns usually are accompanied by a determiner (cf.  Ich habe ein Auto , ‘I have a car’ vs. * Ich habe Auto , ‘I have car’). In recent years, however, the singular count noun  Vertrag  (‘contract’) is frequently used without a determiner, as in  Er hat Vertrag  bis 2013  (‘He has contract until 2013’). Although there is some doubt, intuitively, whether or not this construction is grammatically acceptable to native speakers, it definitely exists in today’s German. In this contribution, we examine the in-between status of the  Vertrag+haben -construction in German in more detail. We try to find an answer to the following question: How can we explain that  Vertrag haben , on the one hand, is less acceptable than the regular  Hunger haben  (‘be hungry’ [‘have hunger’]) but, on the other hand, is much more acceptable than * Auto haben  (‘have car’)? In a diachronic corpus study on  (Er) hat Vertrag , we show, first, that this construction is used in German newspaper texts since 1990 with increasing frequency. Then, in a short survey of the general distribution of determinerless count nouns in German, we show that  Vertrag haben  does not fall under one of the established classes of determinerless constructions in German. Against this background, we take a contrastive look at Swedish, which allows for a great variety of determinerless constructions (e. g.,  Han har bil  ‘He has car’). More specifically, we discuss morpho-syntactic, semantic and information structural properties of Swedish determinerless constructions. Some of these characteristics turn out to be similar for  Vertrag haben . The contrastive view leads us to the more general assumption that  Vertrag haben  is marked because of lacking morpho-syntactic licensing, in contrast to the relevant Swedish constructions. As an account of the problem of how  Vertrag haben  could achieve the status of a German construction to begin with, we propose that it is the semantic noun class of  Vertrag , which we define as abstract, but countable noun, which contributes to the licensing of the construction.

zeitschrift für germanistische linguistik

„Podolski hat Vertrag bis 2007, egal, ob wir in der Ersten oder Zweiten Liga spielen.“: Zur Frage der Akzeptabilität einer neuen Konstruktion mit artikellosem Nomen