Referential dependencies for pronouns and reflexives can be established at different linguistic levels. According to the economy hierarchy of dependencies, syntactic dependencies are ‘cheaper’ than semantic dependencies, which are ‘cheaper’ than discourse dependencies. Psycholinguistic research on English and Dutch has shown that the interpretation of reflexives for which discourse operations are needed (i.e., in locative prepositional phrases) is computationally more costly than the interpretation of coargument reflexives that are based on syntactic dependencies only. Similarly, semantic bound variable interpretation has been shown to be less computationally demanding than discourse-based coreference interpretation. The current study investigates these dependencies in German and replicates the finding that semantic bound variable interpretation is cheaper than discourse-based coreference interpretation. In contrast and as predicted by theoretical accounts that postulate a close relationship of the verb and preposition in German that yields chain formation, no difference was found for the reflexives, supporting the idea that reflexives in prepositional phrases in German depend on the same interpretive mechanisms as coargument reflexives, indicating that the underlying syntactic configuration differs from that in other Germanic languages.

代词和反身词的指称依赖性可以在不同的语言级别上建立。根据依赖的经济层次结构，句法依赖比语义依赖“便宜”，而语义依赖又比话语依赖“便宜”。对英语和荷兰语的心理语言学研究表明，对需要话语操作（即在方位介词短语中）的反身的解释在计算上比对仅基于句法依赖的共格反身的解释成本更高。类似地，语义绑定变量解释已被证明比基于话语的共指解释对计算的要求较低。当前的研究调查了德语中的这些依赖性，并重复了语义绑定变量解释比基于话语的共指解释更便宜的发现。相比之下，正如理论解释所预测的那样，德语中的动词和介词之间存在密切关系，从而产生链式形成，反身词没有发现差异，这支持了这样的观点，即德语介词短语中的反身词依赖于与德语介词短语相同的解释机制。辅助反身，表明潜在的句法结构与其他日耳曼语言不同。