This research was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, project number: 522896622. Semantic Dependency in Preposition Omission Miriam L. Schiele miriam.schiele@uni-tuebingen.de 1. Preposition Omission 4. Stimuli ●In elliptical clauses, prepositions are either kept (pied-piping) or dropped (P-omission): ●Merchant (2001) argues that P-omission is only licensed in languages which allow prepositions to be stranded, e.g., English: (1) Who did John go to the party with? ●In contrast, German does not allow such preposition-stranding: (2) *Wem hat sie mit gesprochen? ●Merchant’s generalization seems to be borne out for German, as pied- piping is preferred over P-omission (Molimpakis, 2019, Lemke 2021) Who did Peter talk to? (To) Bill. ●Example stimulus with semantic dependency: (3) A: Paul hat mit seinem Bruder auf etwas gewartet. ‘Paul waited for something with his brother.’ B: Ja, auf den Zug. (dependent, pied-piping) B′: Ja, den Zug. (dependent, P-omission) ‘Yes, (for) the train.’ ●Example stimulus without semantic dependency: (4) A: Paul hat mit jemandem auf den Zug gewartet. ‘Paul waited for the train with someone.’ B: Ja, mit seinem Bruder. (optional, pied-piping) B′: Ja, seinem Bruder. (optional, P-omission) ‘Yes, (with) his brother.’ 2. Semantic Dependency 5. Results ●Semantic dependency refers to the relation between the verb and the PP (Hawkins 2004) −the PP is required (e.g., believe in sth./sb., look after sb.) or −the PP is optional (e.g., swim with sb., smile at sb.) ●A corpus study on English revealed that P-omission is nearly four times more likely than pied-piping in the presence of semantic dependencies (Nykiel & Hawkins 2020) →The acceptability of P-omission seems to be influenced by whether the PP is semantically required or not ●However, whether semantic dependencies between the verb and the PP interfere with P-omission has not been tested for German so far Does German pattern with English? 3. Study Design ●2 x 2 factorial within subject design ●SEMANTIC DEPENDENCY: dependent or optional ●PREPOSITION: pied-piping or P-omission ●12 critical items plus 24 filler items and 3 attention items ●Stimuli are presented in a Latin square design in pseudo-random order ●32 native German speakers (29 used for analysis), recruited via Prolific ●Participants are asked to rate the naturalness of speaker B’s answer on a scale from 1 ‘fully natural’ to 7 ‘fully unnatural’ ●Pied-piping is significantly more acceptable than P-omission (t = 5.25, p < 0.01), but P-omission is not rated as ungrammatical (𝑥= 4.94), contra Merchant‘s generalization ●Significant interaction between PREPOSITION and SEMANTIC DEPENDENCY (t = 2.61, p = 0.03) →The degradation caused by P-omission is significantly lower in the presence of semantic dependencies References: Hawkins, J. A. 2004. Efficiency and Complexity in Grammars. OUP. • Lemke, R. 2021. Experimental investigations on the syntax and usage of fragments. Language Science Press. • Merchant, J. 2001. The Syntax of Silence: Sluicing, islands, and the theory of ellipsis. OUP. • Molimpakis, E. 2019. Accepting Preposition-Stranding under Sluicing Cross-linguistically; a Noisy-Channel Approach. Doctoral thesis. UCL. • Nykiel, J. & J. A. Hawkins. 2020. English fragments, minimize domains, and minimize forms. Language and Cognition 12(3), 411-443. 6. Conclusions ●Findings pattern with results from corpus study on English ●Semantic subcategorization influences syntactic form ●Cross-linguistic research is needed to fully validate/falsify Merchant‘s generalization Main takeaway: The strength of the semantic dependency between the verb and the PP seems to be a more reliable predictor of P-omission than a language’s ability to strand its prepositions Pied piping P omission Preposition aw ratings dependent optional