Adjectives and the Syntax of German(Ic) Dps
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Adjectives and the Syntax of German(ic) DPs Dissertation zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades eines Doktors der Philosophie (Dr.phil.) vorgelegt von Rehn, Alexandra an der Geisteswissenschaftliche Sektion Fachbereich Sprachwissenschaft Konstanz, 2017 Konstanzer Online-Publikations-System (KOPS) URL: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bsz:352-2-b9ddqk7dieg8 Gutachter: 1. Gutachterin: PD Dr. Ellen Brandner 2. Gutachter: Prof. Dr. Josef Bayer 3. Gutachterin: Prof. Dr. Artemis Alexiadou Tag der mündlichen Prüfung: 22.06.2018 ii Acknowledgments Writing this dissertaton was exciting and challenging and I would not have been able to complete this task without the help of many people around me. First and foremost, I want to thank my first supervisor Ellen Brandner, who always gave me the freedom I wanted and the support I needed - be it Monday morning or Sunday evening! I cannot count the hours we spent with inspiring linguistic discussions. In moments of doubt, when I stopped believing in myself, Ellen encouraged me and I would not have been able to complete this work without her support! I am also very grateful to my second supervisor Josef Bayer, for his support and his input from which I greatly benefitted and that helped me to complete and improve my thesis. An important part of this was of course the ‘Syntaxkolloquium’ and the pizza at La Grotta afterwards. I also want to give a very big thank you to Artemis Alexiadou for her support and for being a member of the committee! Completing a PhD does not only depend on intellectual but also on financial support. I thank the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes for believing in my work and providing me with a scholarship - without this scholarship this thesis might never have been completed! I thank Matthias Frenz, Thomas Ludwig and Burkhard Lehner of the Studienstiftung, who - among others of course - supported me in the three years I was part of this fantastic network! Since I collected my data in Ellen’s project SynALM, there were of course other members in this project and I want to thank these people for the good work and the good time! First of all, I thank my colleague Iris Bräuning, especially for her help at the very beginning when I became a part of the project. I also thank all the student assistants who were part of the team, especially Julia Sondermann who I worked with as a student assistant myself - it was a fantastic time and a lot of fun. It would not have been the same without her. I also want to give a special thanks to Mahena Stegmann for her fantastic work and I thank Lorena Baumann and Enrico Zwigart for their continuous good work. I would not have been able to gather such a great amount of data without our helpful and fantastic participants, who took part in our questionnaire studies! The questionnaires had to be translated into the various varieties of Alemannic and I cannot thank those people enough who helped us with this task! Among them is my best and oldest friend Sarah Mailänder, my reliable source for any questions on Swabian. Sarah also proof- read my thesis and I cannot thank her enough for this! I also thank my friend Christiane Heck i who helped us numerous times with translations, as well as Christian Rückert. Even after a long day in work, he sat down, translated for us, and did not get tired of my questions! I thank my flatmate Julia Sandmann and her ‘Oma Inge’ who were another helpful source for our translations. There were of course a lot more people who helped us with this and I am sorry if I cannot name all of them here now! A very big thank you to Christin Schätzle, who often helped me out with my big and small problems regarding corpus searches or other computer issues - and she could solve all of them! I want to give a special thank you to Carmen Kelling for her support, for her open ear regarding all questions on any aspect of formalities, administrative stuff and all the little things one needs to be able to successfully complete a thesis! I thank my flatmate Karin Stork very much for also proof-reading my thesis - just a few days after she moved in with us! And thank you to all people who have been around me in the past few years, especially those, who had an open ear for any linguistic or other issues, like my office-mate Yvonne Viesel or my colleague Stefano Quaglia as well as the rest of the beergarden-group! ii Contents Adjectives and the Syntax of German(ic) DPs ............................................................... i Acknowledgments ....................................................................................................................... i Abbreviations ............................................................................................................................ vi 1 Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 1 2 From Apposition to Attribution ........................................................................................ 11 2.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................... 11 2.2 Indo-European - a language without adjectives? ....................................................... 13 2.3 Nouns and what makes them distinct from Adjectives ............................................. 14 2.3.1 The categorial properties of adjectives - three different approaches ................. 16 2.3.2 Nouns as modifiers of nouns - the issue of nominal compounds ....................... 20 2.4 Nominals in Indo-European ....................................................................................... 22 2.4.1 Pros and Cons of adjectives as a distinct class in IE .......................................... 22 2.5 Nominal modification in languages without adjectives ............................................ 27 2.5.1 The absence of adjectives and the consequences for nominal modification ...... 28 2.6 From Apposition to Attribution ................................................................................. 31 2.6.1 Some general properties of (Close) Apposition ................................................. 31 2.6.2 Syntactic aspects of Close Apposition ............................................................... 33 2.6.3 Apposition in IE ................................................................................................. 39 2.6.4 From apposition to attribution - syntactic aspects of the development .............. 41 2.6.5 Diachronic aspects of the development .............................................................. 45 2.6.6 The further development of attributive adjectives in Germanic......................... 50 2.7 A note on adjectival inflection in Germanic .............................................................. 52 2.7.1 From AgrDP to ModP ........................................................................................ 53 2.8 Nouns and what makes them distinct from adjectives - the diachronic perspective . 55 2.9 Summary .................................................................................................................... 56 3 From Germanic to EarlNHG - the development of German adjectival inflection ........... 58 3.1 The n-declension on adjectives in Germanic – a case of nominalization? ................ 60 3.1.1 The weak adjectival paradigm in Germanic - derivational or inflectional? ....... 61 3.1.2 Syntactic consequences of the two approaches .................................................. 66 3.1.2.1 The syntax of the weak adjective in the human construction - a tentative analysis 73 3.2 Syntactic consequences of the n-declension as a definiteness marker ...................... 77 iii 3.3 The distribution of adjectival inflection from OHG to EarlNHG ............................. 79 3.3.1.1 The marking of indefiniteness with an article - a possible reason for the restructuring of adjectival inflection ............................................................................ 88 3.4 Summary .................................................................................................................... 90 4 Adjectival inflection in Alemannic and Standard German .............................................. 93 4.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................... 94 4.2 The distribution of uninflected adjectives in Alemannic ........................................... 98 4.3 The questionnaire study ........................................................................................... 105 4.3.1 Neither an areal nor a morpho-syntactic distribution ....................................... 107 4.4 Adjectival inflection in German - optional but not disappearing ............................ 114 4.4.1 The special case of rosa and lila ...................................................................... 118 4.4.2 Adjectival inflection – optional with one exception ........................................ 121 4.4.3 Number and oblique case – the only obligatorily marked features .................. 122 4.4.4 Syntactic consequences .................................................................................... 127 4.5 Variation in adjectival inflection in (other) dialects of German .............................. 133 4.5.1 The absence of uninflected Adjectives in StG - the result of Standardization . 135 4.6 Summary .................................................................................................................