Pronoun vs. preposition – where is stress assigned in German prepositional phrases?

Abstract

It has been assumed that function words do not carry phrasal stress unless they are focused or phrased separately. The results from recent studies on German, however, suggest that unfocused function words optionally bear phrasal stress, depending on their phonological size and aspects of grammat-ical structure. The present study investigates the phrasal stress patterns of pronouns and prepositions in German prepositional phrases (PPs). In a controlled production study with nine participants, we tested for an impact of the phonological size of the pronoun (mono- vs. disyllabic) and the functional type of the PP (directional vs. non-directional) on the presence and location of phrasal stress. The non-directional PPs involved the preposition von ( ‘by’) whereas the directional PPs involved the preposition zu (‘to’). The results suggest that stress is regularly realised on function words in German PPs with a pronominal complement. Disyllabic pronouns were found to bear phrasal stress more frequently than monosyllabic pronouns. In non-directional PPs, the pronominal complement received stress in the majority of instances. In directional PPs, phrasal stress was mostly assigned to the preposition (and not to the pronoun). We propose that this pattern results from the relative informativeness of the preposition.