Extraction of a PP from an NP in German is possible only if the headnoun and the governing verb together form a natural predicate. We show that thiscorresponds to collocational frequency of the verb-noun combinations incorpora, based on the metric of ΔP. From this we conclude that frequency shouldbe conceived of as a language-external grammatical building block that candirectly interact with language-internal grammatical building blocks (like trig-gers for movement and economy constraints blocking movement) in excitatoryand inhibitory ways. Integrating frequency directly into the syntax is not anoption in most current grammatical theories. However, things are different inGradient Harmonic Grammar, a version of Optimality Theory where linguistic objectsof various kinds can be assigned strength in the form of numerical values (weights).We show that by combining a Minimalist approach to syntactic derivations with aGradient Harmonic Grammar approach of constraint evaluation, the role of fre-quency in licensing extraction from PP in German can be integrated straightfor-wardly, the only additional prerequisite being that (verb-noun) dependencies qualifyas linguistic objects that can be assigned strength (based on their frequency)
