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Determiners and adjectives in German agree with their head nouns in case, gender, and number. In addition, all adjectives have three paradigms of inflectional forms, which are traditionally called declensions: strong, weak, and mixed. Which declension an adjective occurs in depends on the determiner it combines with, a phenomenon traditionally called agreement. Section 1 presents the main facts about adjective agreement in German, in a fairly theory-neutral fashion. In a rich theory of syntax (like classical transformational grammar) it would be easy to write rules for German which have the right effects. My purpose here is to explore how to describe German adjective agreement in the distinctly lean theory of generalized phrase-structure grammar (GPSG). Section 2 enumerates the principal features of GPSG, paying special attention to those that might figure in a description of these German data; in particular, I argue that subcategorization, agreement, and government should be distinguished in the theoretical framework. Sections 3 and 4 attack the problem of the three adjective declensions. In section 3, several functional accounts of the distribution of forms are subjected to scrut

Author

ARNOLD M. ZWICKY

Published

1986

Language

EN