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Super light-headed relatives, missing prepositions, and span-conditioned allomorphy in German

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Abstract

The ‘missing-P’ phenomenon (Bresnan and Grimshaw in Linguist Inq 9:331–391, 1978) refers to free relative constructions in which one of two prepositions appears to be missing. This paper provides an account of free relatives in German that straightforwardly extends to this phenomenon, drawing on evidence from standard free relatives as well as from previously undiscussed free relatives in East Franconian, which may be formed with a non-wh relative pronoun. Both types of free relatives are argued to be derived from light-headed relatives—to which they are structurally identical underlyingly—through a haplology-like process grounded in featural redundancy over pairs of adjacent spans (Williams in Representation theory, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2003). Contextual allomorphy in the postsyntactic component of the grammar is argued to trigger the non-pronunciation of a matrix argument in a light-headed relative, resulting in a super light-headed relative. As the conditioning environment for allomorphy occurs over multiple terminal nodes, the proposal offers further evidence that spans are morphological units targetable for vocabulary insertion (Svenonius in Spanning. Manuscript, University of Trømso, 2012; Merchant in Linguist Inq 46(2):273–303, 2015). The analysis improves on previous analyses of free relatives in German by providing a unified account of both nominal and prepositional free relatives, meanwhile providing new insight into feature-triggered allomorphy over adjacent spans as well as a method of accounting for the variation observed in the form of the relative pronoun across two varieties of German.

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Acknowledgements

Many thanks are due to invaluable discussions of this work with Jason Merchant, Karlos Arregi, Julian Grove, Greg Kobele, and Asia Pietraszko. I also thank the audience at the LSA 90 in Portland, OR for their feedback as well as the anonymous reviewers of The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics, whose comments and suggestions greatly improved this paper. Finally, I am grateful to Sven Beller and Anya Falk for their extensive help with native judgements. All errors are of course my own.

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    Emily A. Hanink

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Hanink, E.A. Super light-headed relatives, missing prepositions, and span-conditioned allomorphy in German. J Comp German Linguistics 21, 247–290 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10828-018-9096-6

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