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Noun Modifier Inflection in German: A Morphological System in Flux

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2008

Edward G. Fichtner
Edward G. Fichtner
Affiliation:
Queens CollegeCity University of New YorkFlushing, New York 11367-0904
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Abstract

Traditionally, noun modifiers in German fall into two classes, the so-called der- and ein-words, and descriptive or attributive adjectives. In the noun phrase, members of these word classes are inflected by the addition of one or another of two sets of endings, i.e., the primary, strong, or pronominal endings, or the secondary, weak, or nominal endings, in highly predictable combinations. In the data collected by Ljungerud (1955), however, sequences of endings in noun phrases containing nine modifiers occur with noticeable departures from the norm, i.e., folgend, sämtlich, ander-, einig-, viel-, manch-, welch-, irgendwelch-, and solch-. It is concluded that the anomalous sequences of endings in phrases containing these modifers are motivated by the growing association of certain sequences of endings with the feature +/-Generality as a component of the meaning of the noun phrase as a whole.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Germanic Linguistics , Volume 2 , Issue 1 , January 1990 , pp. 23 - 52
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Germanic Linguistics 1990

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