Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-pfhbr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-08T17:00:45.289Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Determiner omission in German prepositional phrases

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2018

TIBOR KISS
TIBOR KISS*
Affiliation:
Sprachwissenschaftliches Institut – Ruhr-Universität Bochum
*
Author’s address: Sprachwissenschaftliches Institut, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, 44780 Bochum, Germany[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In this paper, we present an analysis of so-called determinerless PPs in German, i.e. prepositional phrases that allow singular count nouns to occur without an accompanying determiner, despite other rules in the grammar requiring the presence of the determiner. The analysis is based on annotated corpus data, which are fed into a statistical classifier (applying logistic regression). Superficially, the syntax of bare prepositional phrases is difficult to capture, and intuitions cannot be easily elicited. The analysis is based on data sets for two pairs of German prepositions: mit ‘with’ and ohne ‘without’, and über ‘over, above’ and unter ‘under, below’. The results of the classifiers applied to annotated data indicate which syntactic, morphological and semantic features are responsible for determiner omission. We are able to detect common properties of all four prepositions, as well as preposition-specific, and idiosyncratic properties. The apparently unsystematic conditions for determiner omission can be discerned by tracing the interaction of these properties.

Keywords

corpus analysisdeterminer realizationGeneralized Linear Mixed Modelingprepositionssemanticsstatistical analysis of natural languagesyntax
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 55 , Issue 2 , 01 April 2019 , pp. 305 - 355
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

The research reported herein would not have been possible without the members and affiliates of the ‘PNC Project’, to which I am grateful: Daniel Abbassi, Katharina Börner, Monika Duzy, Ron Hoffmann, Halima Husic, Katja Keßelmeier, Antje Müller, Johanna Poppek, Claudia Roch, Nino Simunic, Tobias Stadtfeld, Jan Strunk, and Vanessa Weidmann. Parts of this paper have been presented at Brandeis University, Simon Fraser University, University of Alberta (Edmonton), Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Universität Leipzig, Stanford University, Universiteit Utrecht, and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology Trondheim. I would like to thank the audiences for their comments. In addition, I would like to thank three anonymous Journal of Linguistics referees for their comments and suggestions. I am indebted to Katharina Börner and Anneli von Könemann for their assistance with the manuscript. Finally, I would like to thank the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) for their support under grant KI-759/5.

References

Agresti, Alan. 2007. An introduction to categorical data analysis, 2nd edn. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar
Aguilar-Guevara, Ana & Zwarts, Joost. 2011. Weak definites and reference to kinds. Proceedings of SALT 20, 179–196.Google Scholar
Allan, Keith. 1980. Nouns and countability. Language 56.3, 541–567.Google Scholar
Anderson, Theodor. 1962. On the distribution of the two-sample Cramér-von-Mises Criterion. The Annals of Mathematical Statistics 33.3, 1148–1159.Google Scholar
Baayen, R. Harald. 2009. Analyzing linguistic data. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Baldwin, Timothy, Beavers, John, van der Beek, Leonoor, Bond, Francis, Flickinger, Dan & Sag, Ivan A.. 2006. In search of a systematic treatment of determinerless PPs. In Saint-Dizier (ed.), 163–179.Google Scholar
Bates, Douglas, Maechler, Martin, Bolker, Ben & Walker, Steven. 2015 lme4: Linear mixed-effects models using ‘Eigen’ and S4. R package version 1.1–8. http://cran.R-project.org/package=lme4 (accessed 18 August 2015).Google Scholar
Borer, Hagit. 2005. Structuring sense: vol. I: In name only. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Brants, Sabine, Dipper, Stefanie, Eisenberg, Peter, Hansen, Silvia, König, Esther, Lezius, Wolfgang, Rohrer, Christian, Smith, George & Uszkoreit, Hans. 2004. TIGER: Linguistic interpretation of a German corpus. Journal of Language and Computation 2, 597–620.Google Scholar
Bresnan, Joan, Cueni, Anna, Nikitina, Tatiana & Baayen, R. Harald. 2007. Predicting the dative alternation. In Bouma, Gerlof, Kraemer, Irene & Zwarts, Joost (eds.), Cognitive foundations of interpretation, 69–94. Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Science.Google Scholar
Chambers, John M. & Hastie, Trevor (eds.). 1992. Statistical models in S. Pacific Grove, CA: Wadsworth & Brooks/Cole.Google Scholar
Chiarcos, Christian, Dipper, Stefanie, Götze, Michael, Leser, Ulf, Lüdeling, Anke, Ritz, Julia & Stede, Manfred. 2008. A flexible framework for integrating annotations from different tools and tagsets. Traitement Automatique des Langues 49.2, 217–246.Google Scholar
Chung, Yeojin, Rabe-Hesketh, Sophia, Dorie, Vincent, Gelman, Andrew & Liu, Jingchen. 2013. A nondegenerate penalized likelihood estimator for variance parameters in multilevel models. Psychometrika 4, 685–709.Google Scholar
Dömges, Florian, Kiss, Tibor, Müller, Antje & Roch, Claudia. 2007. Measuring the productivity of determinerless PPs. In Costello, Fintan, Kelleher, John & Volk, Martin (eds.), Proceedings of the 4th ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on Prepositions, Prague, 31–37.Google Scholar
Duden. 2005. Duden. Die Grammatik. Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut & F.A. Brockhaus AG.Google Scholar
Hamp, Birgit & Feldweg, Helmut. 1997. GermaNet: A lexical-semantic net for German. In Vossen, Piek, Calzolari, Nicoletta, Adriaens, Geerd, Sanfilippo, Antonio & Wilks, Yorick (eds.), Proceedings of the ACL Workshop Automatic Information Extraction and Building of Lexical Semantic Resources for NLP Applications, 9–15.Google Scholar
Helbig, Gerhard & Buscha, Joachim. 2007. Deutsche Grammatik. Ein Handbuch für den Ausländerunterricht. Leipzig: Langenscheidt.Google Scholar
Himmelmann, Nikolaus. 1998. Regularity in irregularity: Article use in adpositional phrases. Linguistic Typology 2.3, 315–353.Google Scholar
Kiss, Tibor. 2007. Produktivität und Idiomatizität von Präposition–Substantiv-Sequenzen. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 26.2, 317–345.Google Scholar
Kiss, Tibor & Alexiadou, Artemis (eds.). 2015. Syntax – Theory and analysis: An international handbook (Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science 42), vol. 2. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Kiss, Tibor, Keßelmeier, Katja, Müller, Antje, Roch, Claudia, Stadtfeld, Tobias & Strunk, Jan. 2010. A logistic regression model of Determiner Omission in PPs. In Huang, Chu-Ren & Jurafsky, Dan (eds.), Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2010), Beijing, 561–569.Google Scholar
Kiss, Tibor, Müller, Antje, Roch, Claudia, Stadtfeld, Tobias, Börner, Katharina & Duzy, Monika. 2016. Ein Handbuch für die Bestimmung und Annotation von Präpositionsbedeutungen im Deutschen (Bochumer Linguistische Arbeitsberichte 14). Bochum: Ruhr-Universität Bochum.Google Scholar
Le Bruyn, Bert, de Swart, Henriëtte & Zwarts, Joost. 2012. Quantificational prepositions. In Graf, Thomas, Paperno, Denis, Szabolcsi, Anna & Tellings, Jos (eds.), Theories of everything: In honor of Ed Keenan (UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics 17), 187–196.Google Scholar
Legendre, Géraldine, Smolensky, Paul & Wilson, Colin. 1998. When is less more? Faithfulness and minimal links in wh-chains. In Barbosa, Pilar, Fox, Danny, Hagstrom, Paul, McGinnis, Martha & Pesetsky, David (eds.), Is the best good enough? Optimality and competition in syntax, 249–289. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Lenth, Russell V. 2016. Least-Squares Means: The R Package lsmeans . Journal of Statistical Software 69.1, 1–33.Google Scholar
Müller, Stefan. 2015. German: A grammatical sketch. In Kiss & Alexiadou(eds.), 1447–1477.Google Scholar
Nivre, Joakim, Hall, Johan, Kübler, Sandra, McDonald, Ryan, Nilsson, Jens, Riedel, Sebastian & Yuret, Deniz. 2007. The CoNLL 2007 shared task on dependency parsing. Proceedings of the CoNLL Shared Task Session of Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning (EMNLP-CoNLL) 2007, Prague, 915–932.Google Scholar
Osborne, Timothy. 2015. Dependency Grammar. In Kiss & Alexiadou(eds.), 1027–1045.Google Scholar
Payne, John & Huddleston, Rodney. 2002. Nouns and noun phrases. In Rodney Huddleston & Geoffrey K. Pullum et al., The Cambridge grammar of the English language, 323–523. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Pelletier, Francis Jeffry. 1975. Non-singular reference: Some preliminaries. Philosophia 5.4, 451–465.Google Scholar
Pollard, Carl & Sag, Ivan A.. 1994. Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Saint-Dizier, Patrick(ed.). 2006. Syntax and semantics of prepositions. Dordrecht: Springer.Google Scholar
Schiller, Anne, Teufel, Simone, Stöckert, Christine & Thielen, Christine. 1999. Guidelines für das Tagging deutscher Textcorpora mit STTS. Ms., Universities of Stuttgart & Tübingen.http://www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/resources/stts-1999.pdf (accessed 18 August 2015).Google Scholar
Schröder, Jochen. 1986. Lexikon deutscher Präpositionen. Leipzig: VEB Verlag Enzyklopädie.Google Scholar
Stvan, Laurel Smith. 2009. Semantic incorporation as an account for some bare singular count noun uses in English. Lingua 119.2, 314–333.Google Scholar
Trawiński, Beata, Sailer, Manfred & Soehn, Jan-Philipp. 2006. Combinatorial aspects of collocational prepositional phrases. In Saint-Dizier (ed.), 181–196.Google Scholar
Wickham, Hadley. 2009. ggplot2: Elegant graphics for data analysis. New York: Springer.Google Scholar
Zuur, Alain, Ieno, Elena N., Walker, Neil, Saveilev, Anatoly & Smith, Graham M.. 2009. Mixed effects models and extensions in ecology with R. New York: Springer.Google Scholar