Grammatical analysis of P-N sequences
DFG project 100083012
My doctoral supervisor Prof. Dr. Tibor Kiss successfully applied for the project which was supported by a DFG grant (KI 759/5-1 and KI 759/5-2)
Objectives & Results
Determinerless PPs are prepositional phrases that allow singular count nouns to occur without a determiner, despite other rules in the grammar requiring its presence. In a wide variety of languages, this rule seems to be weakened, as e.g. in ohne mündliche Vorwarnung, (‘without verbal warnings’), or unter Beobachtung (‘under observation’). The influencing factors are manifold: the countability of the noun sense, the pre- or postnominal modification in the phrase, but also the semantics of the German prepositions, which we first had to model systematically in a meaning inventory (Kiss et al., 2020), since it could not be derived from dictionaries (see graph below). In the course of the project, we have developed an analysis that is based on annotated corpus data, which are fed into a statistical classifier (applying logistic regression) (Kiss & Roch, 2014). The results of the classifiers applied to annotated data indicate which syntactic, morphological and semantic features are responsible for determiner omission. We have thus been able to detect common properties of groups of prepositions, as well as preposition-specific, and idiosyncratic properties.
