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Adjectives in German and Norwegian

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Author

Editor

  • Petra Sleeman
  • Freek van de Velde
  • Harry Perridon

Summary, in English

In this paper, we demonstrate that adjective endings in the Germanic languages do not pattern uniformly. We illustrate this with nine syntactic contexts: possessives involving proper names and pronominals, embedded and unembedded proper names, “disagreeing” pronominal DPs, appositives, definite adjectives, vocatives, and discontinuous noun phrases. We show that German is subject to lexical and structural conditions but Scandinavian is semantic in nature. In German, the weak endings are feature-reduced forms which always have a specific local relation to a certain type of determiner, which triggers the relevant feature reduction. Adopting Distributed Morphology, this reduction in features is implemented by Impoverishment. In Scandinavian, the weak endings are an agreement reflex with a semantic feature have semantics of their own. We follow others in that adjectives are in – what is traditionally called – Spec,AgrP. We propose that the relevant semantic feature is in Agr and the adjective agrees with it. Given the language-specific conditions, the strong endings surface in the remaining contexts in both types of languages as the elsewhere case.

Department/s

Publishing year

2014

Language

English

Pages

245-261

Publication/Series

Adjectives in Germanic and Romance

Volume

212

Document type

Book chapter

Publisher

John Benjamins Publishing Company

Topic

  • Languages and Literature

Keywords

  • adjectives strong weak
  • morphology
  • definiteness
  • German
  • Norwegian

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 0166-0829
  • ISBN: 9789027255952