Topic drop in German: Empirical support for an information-theoretic account to a long-known omission phenomenon

Abstract

German allows for topic drop (Fries1988), the omission of a preverbal constituent from a V2 sentence. I address the underexplored question of why speakers use topic drop with a corpus study and two acceptability rating studies. I propose an information-theoretic explanation based on the Uniform Information Density hypothesis (Levy and Jaeger2007) that accounts for the full picture of data. The information-theoretic approach predicts that topic drop is more felicitous when the omitted constituent is predictable in context and easy to recover. This leads to a more optimal use of the hearer’s processing capacities. The corpus study on the FraC corpus (Horch and Reich2017) shows that grammatical person, verb probability and verbal inflection impact the frequency of topic drop. The two rating experiments indicate that these differences in frequency are also reflected in acceptability and additionally evidence an impact of topicality on topic drop. Taken together my studies constitute the first systematic empirical investigation of previously only sparsely researched observations from the literature. My information-theoretic account provides a unifying explanation of these isolated observations and is also able to account for the effect of verb probability that I find in my corpus study.

Predictable Words Are More Likely to Be Omitted in Fragments–Evidence From Production Data

“…An important property of UID is that the omission or insertion of optimal is limited to variation between "the bounds defined by grammar" (Jaeger, 2010, p. 25): Omissions which are ruled out by grammar will not be preferred even if they distribute information more uniformly across the signal. For instance, Schäfer (2021) finds UID effects on the omission of preverbal subjects in German text messages, however, in more prototypically written text types in her corpus there is not a single instance of this construction. With respect to fragments, this predicts that omissions are restricted to those that are available in the language and text type under investigation.…”

“…Information-theoretic processing constraints have been shown to explain the distribution of a wide range of reduction phenomena. Their application ranges from phonological reduction (Bell et al, 2003(Bell et al, , 2009Aylett and Turk, 2004;Demberg et al, 2012;Kuperman and Bresnan, 2012;Seyfarth, 2014;Pate and Goldwater, 2015;Brandt et al, 2017Brandt et al, , 2018Malisz et al, 2018) to morphological effects on contraction (Frank and Jaeger, 2008) and case marker omission (Kurumada and Jaeger, 2015;Norcliffe and Jaeger, 2016) to pronominalization (Tily and Piantadosi, 2009), and, what is most closely related to omissions in fragments, optional omissions of various types of function words (Levy and Jaeger, 2007;Jaeger, 2010;Asr and Demberg, 2015;Lemke et al, 2017) and preverbal subjects (Kravtchenko, 2014;Schäfer, 2021).…”

German demonstrative pronouns differ in their sensitivity to discourse and sentence topics

“…Note that the frequent occurrence of zero pronouns here confirms that the referent is indeed topical, since German allows topic drop in restricted contexts but not the omission of pronouns in general (cf. Trutkowski, 2016;Schäfer, 2021).…”

“…In them, the final sentence had the same subject and topic referent as the prefinal sentence but did not realize it overtly, which is possible under some circumstances in German (topic drop, cf. Trutkowski, 2016;Schäfer, 2021). However, the final sentence was introduced with a contrastive connector (aber 'but' in (8)).…”