Cohesive substitution in English and German 215
A different case are constructions with postmodification:(13) We enjoy seeing all the ‘old’ faces again, after having had the summer off, and
then it is a lot of fun to get to know all the new faces and the ones we have
seen in other programs. [EO_WEB]
Wir freuen uns, nach der Sommerpause all die ‘alten Gesichter’ wieder zu
sehen und es macht viel Spaß, die neuen Gesichter kennen zu lernen oder die,
die wir in den anderen Programmen kennen gelernt haben. [GTRANS_WEB]
German translations of postmodified ones are frequently realized by the demon-
strative pronoun der/die/das (see 13), structurally ambiguous between substitution
and ellipsis.
2.2.1.2 Core nominals: The perspective from German. Candidates for core forms
of nominal substitution in German are eine(r,s) for singular nouns, keine(r,s),
solche(r,s), welche(r,s) for singular and plural. Example (14) shows the case of
German eines:
(14) ‘I don’t have a car,’ he said. ‘If I borrowed one, would you ...?’ [EO_FICTION]
‘Ich habe kein Auto’, sagte er. ‘Wenn ich mir eines leihen würde, würdest du ...?’
[GTRANS_FICTION]
With a few morphological variants of eine(r,s) we have a structural ambiguity
between substitution and ellipsis. An interesting observation against the interpre-
tation of eine(r,s) as indefinite article and thus ellipsis, even where the morphology
would allow that interpretation, is the fact that the contractions typical of the use
as an article would not work in such cases (gib mir ‘nen Ball, ‘ne Scheibe, ‘n Spiel,
but not with substitution *gibt mir auch ‘nen, ‘ne, ‘n).^6
The German candidates for nominal substitution show some typical linguistic
properties. These relate to semantic acceptability (co-reference vs. type-reference/
co-denotation) on the one hand: in (15) only one interpretation is acceptable.
Where both the reference and the substitution variants are acceptable as in (16),
they are so with different interpretations.
- Hence Das sind schöne Bälle – Ich möchte einen roten can be analyzed as ellipsis, and hence
allow contraction: Ich möchte nen roten. However, Das sind schöne Bälle – Ich möchte einen in
rot is a definite case of substitution, hence the unacceptability of *Ich möchte nen in rot – all of
which falls clearly within general patterns of grammaticalization models: substitute eine(r,s) is
grammaticalized, whereas eine(r,s) in an ellipsis is just the article preceding a gap.