A southern German use of prefield- e ses: Evidence from the corpus and an experimental study

Abstract There is a use of the German third person neuter pronoun e ses in the prefield, known as prefield- e ses, which is characterized by being neither referential, nor an argument of the verb. According to Speyer’s (2008, 2009) optimality theoretic prefield ranking, this should only occur if a sentence contains no alternative element eligible to be moved to the prefield. This paper investigates a so far unnoticed use of e ses in the prefield in combination with a demonstrative pronoun dies and a copula verb ist, which will be referred to as Es ist dies-sentence. This construction is an instance of prefield- e ses, but contravenes the expectations about the use of prefield- e ses postulated by Speyer, since Es ist dies-sentences do contain a suitable candidate to fill the prefield, the demonstrative pronoun dies. In a corpus study, Es ist dies-sentences are compared to a sample of Dies ist-sentences. According to the corpus data, Es ist dies occurs predominantly in southern dialects. Significant differences between the two samples concern 1) the distance to the antecedent of dies and 2) the type of content of the sentence. An online rating study, that compared acceptability judgments of Es ist dies-sentences between speakers from different regions, confirmed that Es ist dies-sentences are a phenomenon of southern dialects. In the light of these results, a modification of Speyer’s (2008, 2009) Stochastic OT model is proposed.