German prepositions and their kin. A survey with respect to the resolution of PP attachment ambiguities

Abstract

This paper surveys German prepositions and their relatives: contracted prepositions, pronominal adverbs, and reciprocal pronouns. We elaborate on corpus frequencies for these and on their properties with respect to PP attachment. We show that prepositions and contracted prepositions can be handled together. They show an overall attachment tendency towards the noun. But pronominal adverbs and reciprocal pronouns show an overall attachment tendency towards the verb and therefore must be treated separately.