Experiment 4: Preposition omission in German .1 Background.1 Background

Experiments 4 and 5 empirically test the predictions of the PSG for German and English respectively. If the PSG indeed is the result of a movement restriction, the movement and deletion account predicts that preposition omission in fragments is possible in English but not in German. Furthermore, experiment 4 establishes a baseline for the follow-up experiment 6.

For German, Merchant et al. (2013) conducted a similar experiment that con-firms the introspective judgments for question-answer pairs like (15), which I repeat here as (24) for convenience: Just like the movement and deletion account predicts, in this context, PP short answers are rated significantly better than DP short answers (𝜇_𝑃𝑃 = 5.99 vs.𝜇_𝐷𝑃= 4.76 on a 7-point Likert scale where 7 = fully

‘Who was Anna talking to?’

a. Mit

Merchant et al. (2013) tested negative short answers to polar questions like (25) (Merchant et al. 2013: 34), where fragments were always contrastive foci in the sense of Krifka (2007), i.e. they overtly negate a contextually given alternative.

The intention was to improve the acceptability of fronting objects in sentential structures and to obviate the objection that the presumed underlying sentences involving fronting should be rejected across the board.

(25) a. Willst

‘Do you want to do without the goalkeeper?’

24Given that the movement and deletion accounts predicts DP short answers to be ungrammati-cal, their ratings are surprisingly high. The authors explain this with the fact that case-marked DP fragments are not ungrammatical across the board in German, but that they cannot be derived when the question asks for a PP.

b. Nein,

Like the experiment by Merchant et al. (2013) I contrasted PP and prepositional case-marked DP fragments in an acceptability rating task. The movement and deletion account predicts that PPs should be rated significantly better than DPs.

3.2.2.2 Materials

A sample item is given in (26). Unlike in the study by Merchant et al. (2013), the short answers were always information foci, that is, answers to questions that do not belong to a limited set of contextually given alternatives. Information foci are more similar to the non-contrastive instances of short answer fragments discussed in the literature, like (24). All items contained a question-answer pair.

In order to increase their naturalness, they were introduced by a two-sentence context story.

(26) Martin is sitting at the kitchen table in his shared apartment and is wrap-ping a present.

‘His roommate Nils asks him: For whom is the package?’

b. Martin

The preposition was always given in the question, because givenness is a re-quirement for ellipsis according to both families of sentential accounts of frag-ments.²⁵ Otherwise, the omission of the preposition in the answer would be blocked for this independent reason in English as well. Finally, like in the study

25This is not the case for allwh-phrases that require a PP answer in German, as the locative example in (i) shows.

by Merchant et al. (2013), all DP fragments appeared in the case required by the corresponding preposition in the context question (𝑛_𝐴𝑐𝑐 = 7,𝑛_𝐷𝑎𝑡 = 11,𝑛_𝐺𝑒𝑛= 2).

3.2.2.3 Procedure

Materials were presented together with experiment 1 to 70 undergraduate stu-dents who were self-reported native speakers of German. The study was con-ducted on the Internet using the LimeSurvey questionnaire presentation soft-ware. Subjects were compensated with the participation in a lottery of 10 ×

€ 30.00 among all participants. Their task consisted in rating the naturalness of the answer, which was italicized, in the context of the preceding material on a 7-point Likert scale (7 = fully natural). Each subject rated 20 items (10 PP and 10 DP short answers), which were presented with 20 items from experiment 1 and 47 fillers. The fillers were also short dialogues with fragment answers. The fragment answer was never a PP or a prepositional case-marked DP. See Section 3.1.1.4 for details on presentation, randomization and exclusions.

Table 3.8: Mean ratings (standard deviation) across conditions in ex-periment 4 and in the corresponding exex-periment by Merchant et al.

(2013).

Condition Exp. 4 Merchant et al. (2013)

Preposition present (PP) 6.61 (0.99) 5.99 (1.64) Preposition omitted (DP) 4.42 (2.05) 4.76 (2.03)

3.2.2.4 Results

Like in Merchant et al. (2013), PP fragments (𝜇 = 6.62, 𝜎 = 0.99) were rated as more acceptable than DP fragments (𝜇 = 4.42, 𝜎 = 2.05). Table 3.8 shows that even the absolute ratings were relatively close to those in Merchant et al. (2013).

This replicates their findings with non-contrastive short answers.

The data were analyzed with CLMMs in^Rfollowing the procedure described in Section 3.1.1.5. The full model contained fixed effects for Preposition, the prepositional Case (Accusative/Dative/Genitive) and the Position of the trial in the time-course of the experiment as well as all two-way interactions thereof. I included by-subject random intercepts and slopes for Preposition, Case and the interaction thereof, as well as by-item random intercepts and slopes for Preposi-tion. As Case was not varied within items, there were no by-item random effects

for this predictor. The final model (see Table 3.9) contained only fixed effects for Position, Case and Preposition. The Position effect (𝜒² = 12.5, 𝑝 < 0.001) shows familiarization with the task, which is factored out by including it in the model and is not of theoretical interest. The Case effects indicate acceptability differences between items, but the absence of Preposition:Case interactions in-dicates that Case had no specific effect on the acceptability of preposition omis-sion. Therefore, and because prepositional case was not balanced and varied sys-tematically across materials in this experiment, I consider it a further control predictor. The highly significant effect of Preposition (𝜒² = 44.26, 𝑝 < 0.001) replicates the effect found by Merchant et al. (2013): Omitting the preposition in short answers to questions asking for a PP is strongly dispreferred in German.

Table 3.9: Fixed effects in the final CLMM for experiment 4.

Predictor Estimate SE 𝜒² 𝑝

Preposition -4.601 0.474 44.26 <0.001 ***

Case (dat v acc) -1.247 0.398 8.21 <0.01 **

Case (gen v acc) -3.134 0.653 15.61 <0.001 ***

Position 0.009 0.003 12.5 <0.001 ***

3.2.2.5 Discussion

Experiment 4 replicates the effect for information focus that Merchant et al.

(2013) report for contrastive focus. Table 3.8 shows that the average ratings across Preposition conditions were relatively close to those reported by Merchant et al.

(2013) even in absolute terms (6.61 vs. 5.99 in the PP condition and 4.42 vs. 4.76 in the DP condition). This clearly confirms the introspective acceptability judge-ments for examples like (15). From the perspective of the movement and deletion account, it might seem surprising that DP fragments, which should be impossible to derive, are rated as relatively acceptable. Merchant et al. (2013) attribute this to the fact that they are not ungrammatical per se in other contexts, such as the ones I tested in experiment 1. Furthermore, Merchant et al. (2013) emphasize that in acceptability rating studies only the differences between conditions but not the absolute ratings can be interpreted, because there is no absolute reference level of (un)grammaticality on the 7-point scale. I return to this issue in the dis-cussion of experiment 6, which compares the acceptability of PP short answers to prepositional case and nominative DP short answers. For the time being, what

matters is that the data show a strong preference for realizing the preposition in German short answers to PP questions and hence replicate the effect found by Merchant et al. (2013).

3.2.3 Experiment 5: Preposition omission in English