36.2105, Books: The Licensing and Usage of Topic Drop in German: Schäfer (2025)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-2105. Tue Jul 08 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.2105, Books: The Licensing and Usage of Topic Drop in German: Schäfer (2025)

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Date: 08-Jul-2025
From: Sebastian Nordhoff [support at langsci-press.org]
Subject: The Licensing and Usage of Topic Drop in German: Schäfer (2025)


Title: The licensing and usage of topic drop in German
Publication Year: 2025

Publisher: Language Science Press
           http://langsci-press.org
Book URL: https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/490

Author(s): Lisa Schäfer

eBook

Abstract:

This book is concerned with the licensing and usage of the elliptical
construction topic drop in German. The term topic drop refers to the
omission of the preverbal constituent in declarative verb-second
sentences, for example, the omission of the subject ich (‘I’) in the
sentence Bin gleich zurück (‘Am right back’). Topic drop exists in
most of the Germanic verb-second languages and typically occurs in
spoken language and text types such as SMS, chats, notes, etc.
While much of the previous research has focused on individual specific
properties of topic drop, often adopting a purely theoretical
perspective, this book presents a systematic investigation of both the
syntactic properties and usage conditions of topic drop based on
empirical evidence from a corpus study and 12 acceptability rating
studies.
The first part of the book investigates the licensing of topic drop,
in particular its restriction to the preverbal ‘prefield’ position.
The results of four rating studies on topic drop in different prefield
configurations lead to a refined prefield condition based on proposals
by Rizzi (1994) and Freywald (2020) that is independent of topicality.
Moreover, they inform the discussion on the most suitable syntactic
analysis of topic drop, supporting a PF-deletion approach.
The second part of the book presents and tests an
information-theoretic account of topic drop usage that builds on the
Uniform Information Density hypothesis (Levy & Jaeger 2007). In a
corpus study and seven rating studies, several potential usage factors
are investigated, including grammatical person and verb
predictability. The results provide initial evidence suggesting that
topic drop usage can be explained by general processing principles:
The prefield constituent is omitted when it is redundant and realized
overtly when it facilitates the processing of the following verb. This
information-theoretic explanation is based on independently evidenced
processing mechanisms, bundles isolated claims from the theoretical
literature, and allows for a unified analysis of topic drop with other
types of ellipsis and reduction.

Linguistic Field(s): Syntax

Subject Language(s): German (deu)

Language Family(ies): German

Written In: English (eng)



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