Präpositionen, die den 2 : Status regieren können

The topics of this article are the prepositions um, ohne, (an)statt and außer, which are able to govern the second status (i.e. the infinitival verb with zu). On the basis of a corpus taken from various sources, the article analyses what kind of expressions can be connected with infinitival constructions introduced by um-, ohne-, (an)statt- and außer. It examines how these expressions impact on the semantic relation of the preposition. The study then turns to the problem of determining the semantic subject of infinitival constructions. It is shown that ohne and (an)statt are syntactically and semantically very similar, whereas um and außer have different properties, um expecially in respect of its semantics, and außer in respect of its syntactic properties.