-ung Nominalizations of Verbs of Saying in German Events and Propositions

-ung nominalizations of verbs of saying in German can be interpreted as events or propositions. There are context partners of such nominals which disambiguate the reading or suggest preferences. We consider a specific ambiguous constellation which is very frequent in German, where the nominal is the internal argument of a PP with nach. We detail the semantic representations of corresponding sentence types in the framework of Discourse Representation Theory and conclude from this an explanation of why some context partners suggest the one reading and some the other. The findings are currently used in corpus analyses to test the relevance and coverage of the stipulated criteria and to optimize preference weights statistically. This shows a way to avoid deep semantic evaluation with respect to disambiguation and to replace it by a combination of shallow semantic interpretation (based upon selectional restrictions and semantic hierarchies) and data driven methods. We present some of the results.