A southern German use of prefield-eses: Evidence from the corpus and an experimental study

There is a use of the German third person neuter pronounesesin the prefield, known as prefield-eses, which is characterized by being neither referential, nor an argument of the verb. According to Speyer’s (2008, 2009) optimality theoretic prefield ranking, this should only occur if a sentence contains no alternative element eligible to be moved to the prefield. This paper investigates a so far unnoticed use ofesesin the prefield in combination with a demonstrative pronoundiesand a copula verbist, which will be referred to asEs ist dies-sentence. This construction is an instance of prefield-eses, but contravenes the expectations about the use of prefield-esespostulated by Speyer, sinceEs ist dies-sentences do contain a suitable candidate to fill the prefield, the demonstrative pronoundies. In a corpus study,Es ist dies-sentences are compared to a sample ofDies ist-sentences. According to the corpus data,Es ist diesoccurs predominantly in southern dialects. Significant differences between the two samples concern 1) the distance to the antecedent ofdiesand 2) the type of content of the sentence. An online rating study, that compared acceptability judgments ofEs ist dies-sentences between speakers from different regions, confirmed thatEs ist dies-sentences are a phenomenon of southern dialects. In the light of these results, a modification of Speyer’s (2008, 2009) Stochastic OT model is proposed.