German prepositions and their kin

Abstract

This paper surveys German prepositions and their relatives: contracted preposi-tions, pronominal adverbs, and reciprocal pronouns. We elaborate on corpus fre-quencies for these and on their properties with respect to PP attachment. Prepo-sitions and contracted prepositions show an overall attachment tendency towards the noun. But pronominal adverbs and reciprocal pronouns show an overall at-tachment tendency towards the verb and therefore must be treated separately.