Maria Cieschinger - Constraints on the Contraction of Preposition and Definite Article in German

In German, we can find forms that seem to be contractions of a preposition and the definite article and both the contracted and uncontracted forms are used. Consider the following examples where CONTR indicates the use of a contracted from.

(1)    Klaus sitzt in dem (*im) Auto, das er sich letzte Woche gekauft hat.
(Klaus is sitting in the (*CONTR-in-the) car that he bought last week.)

(2)    Fritz tells Anna about the plans for his wedding next Saturday.
Am (*an dem) Abend gibt es dann noch ein Feuerwerk.
(CONTR-in-the (*in the) evening there will also be a display of fireworks.)

(3)    In Europa wird Weihnachten im (*in dem) Winter gefeiert.
(In Europe, christmas is celebrated CONTR-in-the (*in the) winter.)

In each of the above sentences only one of the two preposition-article combinations is acceptable. Already those few examples indicate that the use of either of the two forms is not a matter of choice on part of the speaker, i.e. that the use of preposition-article contractions is restricted to certain contexts which exclude the use of the un-contracted form, and vice versa. Interesting questions that arise at this point are: Which constraints govern the use of preposition-article contractions in German? And are these constraints lexical constraints or is it the utterance context that determines which of the two forms has to be used?Surprisingly, there have been only very few attempts to give an adequate account of the use of German preposition-article contractions (e.g. Löbner (1985), Haberland (1985), Hartmann (1980)). Both Haberland and Hartmann remain on a descriptive level only and do not propose an underlying theory. Löbner, in contrast, proposes a theory of definiteness that is supposed to correctly characterise contractions as well. It can be shown, however, that this proposal often does not make the correct predictions. That is why I suggest a new account of preposition-article contractions.I want to suggest that there are three fundamentally different ways in which nominals can be used and that each of these uses requires one of the two forms and prohib-its the other. The three uses of nominals are: The contextual, the small-world and the generalising use.Anaphoric, endophoric and deictic uses of nominals belong to the contextual use and the un-contracted form is obligatory (cf. example (1)). The small-world use con-tains local names and bridging anaphors and can only be used in a particular community or a locally restricted domain (cf.example (2)). The small-world use of a nominal requires the contracted form, as does the generalising use which is used in generic sen-tences or as generic nominals (cf. Krifka (1995)). The generalising use of a nominal can be distinguished from both the contextual and the small-world use in that it does not refer to a particular object, whereas the two latter uses do refer to particular objects. This distinction is inspired by Donnellan’s (1966) notion of the attributive and the referential use of a definite description, the generalising use roughly corresponding to the attributive and the contextual and the small-world use to the referential use in Donnellan’s sense. In accordance with Donnellan’s approach, it should also be emphasised that the context of an utterance always has to be taken into account when we try to determine which of the three uses is present in a given sentence.