Experiencer-object verbs are psychological predicates that realise their stimulus argument as their subject in the canonical transitive pattern. In some sentences, though, a part of the semantic stimulus is expressed by a phrase external to the subject, often a PP, in a pattern like X Verb Y P Z as in ‘His successor frightens citizens with his brashness’. Such cases have been referred to as ‘split stimuli’ in the literature. We present an explorative corpus-based investigation of split stimuli in German and show that they are frequent, that the number of prepositions licensing such readings is surprisingly large, that the PPs involved are adjuncts (they are optional and there may be more than one of them), and that verbs differ largely with respect to the number of split-stimulus examples with different prepositions. A further semantic annotation study of the subjects of the sentences and the internal arguments of the prepositions suggests that the ‘split’ effect arises from the interplay of the semantics of the verbs with well-known readings of the prepositions, eliminating the need to postulate specific ‘split stimulus’ readings of the prepositions.