Antonymic Prepositions and Weak Referentiality (3.10)

Analyses that treat determiner omission in terms of weak referentiality have recently been adopted for determinerless PPs. A missing discourse referent is involved in both cases (Farkas and de Swart 2003, Espinal and McNally 2011, de Swart 2012). With regard to the German prepositions mit and ohne, we will show that the former accepts the determiner omission reluctantly, while determiner omission is almost the rule for the latter. This conclusion is reached through the application of annotation mining to derive multiple factors that influence the omission or realisation of a determiner. We argue that the semantics of the P, the sense of the PP in the context, and lexical influences of the nouns play a major role. As the distributions of mit and ohne are highly distinct, we conclude that they should not be analysed in a unified way.