The Acceptability of Extraposition of PPs out of NP in German

Abstract

Two acceptability judgment experiments are presented which investigate extraposition of PPs out of NP in German. The experiments are concerned with the weight of the extraposed constituent and the question of how to define weight, as well as with the definiteness status of the NP out of which the PP is extraposed. In both experiments, sentences with a PP in adjacent position to its NP were rated significantly higher than sentences with extraposed PPs. The number of phrasal nodes does not have an influence on the acceptability of extraposition, while the length of the constituent seems to play a role. The findings also suggest that there is a "soft'' definiteness constraint on the extraposition of PP out of NP in German.