11.2688, Sum: Preposition Stranding in German

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LINGUIST List:  Vol-11-2688. Tue Dec 12 2000. ISSN: 1068-4875.

Subject: 11.2688, Sum: Preposition Stranding in German

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1)
Date:  Sat, 9 Dec 2000 19:03:26 -0500
From:  "C.F. Hempelmann" <hempelma at purdue.edu>
Subject:  Prepositions/German

-------------------------------- Message 1 -------------------------------

Date:  Sat, 9 Dec 2000 19:03:26 -0500
From:  "C.F. Hempelmann" <hempelma at purdue.edu>
Subject:  Prepositions/German

Dear Listmembers,

This is the summary to my request for information on stranded
prepositions in northern German dialects, posted on Mon, 20 Nov 2000
(http://linguistlist.org/issues/11/11-2550.html). It incorporates the
helpful information from the colleagues listed below and acknowledged
in parentheses with a (*).

The question I raised boils down to why (1c) is ungrammatical in
standard German, but acceptable in several predominantly northern,
low German (*Reese), but also southern dialects (*Fletcher, Menzel,
Schmirler) and common in Dutch (*Brand, Fletcher, Reese) and
Plattdeutsch (which I know passively through my parents):
(1) a.  Ich weiss nichts   davon.
         I   know  nothing  that-of
     b.  Davon weiss ich nichts t. (standard)
     c.  Da weiss ich nichts von. (dialectal)

While PPs are islands, the pronominal adverbs/prepositional
contractions (pro-PPs) like "davon," "damit" make extraction of the
[-case] expletive pronoun "da(r)" possible. It is an R-pronoun in
Riemsdijk's terms (1978), for which this "escape hatch" is open.

Here is a range of examples, illustrating the issue at hand and
related phenomena:
(2)  a. Es ist die Rede [PP von der Sache ]   standard
         It is  the talk     of  the thing
         This thing is being talked about
      b. Es ist die Rede [PP davon ]	      standard
         It is  the talk     that-of
         This is being talked about
      c. Es ist davon die Rede [PP t ]	      standard
      d. Davon ist die Rede [PP t ]	      standard
      e. Da ist die Rede [PP davon ]	      southern/northern
      f. Da davon ist die Rede.                southern
      g. Da ist die Rede [PP t von ]	      northern
      h. Da ist t von die Rede [PP t ]         northern
In view of this I side with (*Schmirler): "komisch kommt mir nun die
standardform vor [now the standard form looks odd to me]."
Another possibly related issue are splitable prepositional verbs,
like "anerkennen" (*Koller).

According to Hornstein and Weinberg (1981) the complement which the
preposition subcategorizes for is reanalyzed as a standard object of
the verb, which in turn is reanalyzed to simply incorporate the
seemingly stranded preposition: The expletive pronoun is free to go.

What makes the partial extraction possible for Klumpp (1997) is that
the prepositions are rather to be understood as adverbs and as such
enjoy a much larger range for movement.

Oppenrieder's (1991) is an interesting approach (not least because
his examples are by Jürgen von der Manger) based on the assumption
that the so-called stranded prepositions are rather remnants of the
following doubling construction with subsequent (optional) deletion
of the basis of the doubling (*Menzel).
(3) a. da will ich nichts davon hören
     b. da will ich nichts t von hören

Müller (2000) touches on the issue in his optimality-theory based
approach to explain the pro-PPs as a repair method for the
"Wackernagel-Ross dilemma." They can occupy the preferred position in
the sentence because they are "weaker" than other pronominal
constructions. Variation between standard and non-standard German can
be explained by different, but related, hierarchies of constraints.

The following colleagues provided me with valuable input and
interesting questions:

Mark Brand
Eva Breindl
William H. Fletcher
Veronika Koller
Peter Menzel
Johannes Reese
Karl Reinhardt
Klaus Schmirler

These sources are a good starting point to work on such constructions
(special thanks to Eva Breindl who pointed me to her bibliographic
database on prepositions at
http://www.ids-mannheim.de/gra/konnektoren/p-anfrage.html and to most
of the following):

Hornstein, Norbert and Amy Weinberg. 1981. "Case Theory and
Preposition Stranding." Linguistic Inquiry 12: 55-91.

Klumpp, Franziska. 1997. "Zu den Ursachen der Ungrammatikalität von
Präpositionsstranden im Deutschen." Neuphilologische Mitteilungen
98/2: 147-159.

Müller, Gereon.2000. "Das Pronominaladverb als Reparaturphänomen."
Linguistische Berichte 182: 139-178.

Oppenrieder, Wilhelm. 1991. "Preposition Stranding im Deutschen? - Da
will ich nichts von hören!" In: Fanselow, Gisbert and Sascha Felix.
Eds. Strukturen und Merkmale Syntaktischer Kategorien. Tübingen:
Narr: 159-173.

Riemsdijk, Henk C. van. 1978. A Case Study in Syntactic Markedness:
the Binding Nature of Prepositional Phrases. Lisse: The Peter de
Ridder Press.

Thanks again for the help. I will continue working on the issue and
will be glad to share thoughts individually,

Christian F. Hempelmann
Interdepartmental Program in Linguistics
Purdue University
Heavilon Hall
West Lafayette, IN 47907
e-mail: hempelma at purdue.edu

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