Was motiviert die partielle Unflektiertheit des indefiniten Artikels?

German noun phrases containing an ankle realise gender and case inflection on that article. There seems to be only a few exceptions to this rule, e.g., the indefinite article (ein) and the related negation (kein) and possessive articles (mein, dein, etc.) remain uninflected in nom.sg.msc. and nom./a...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Zeitschrift für germanistische Linguistik 2006-09, Vol.34 (3), p.354
Main Author: Bittner, Dagmar
Format: Article
Language:ger
Subjects:
Determiners
Functional heads
German language
Grammar
Grammatical categories
Inflection (Morphology)
Language acquisition
Language history
Linguistics
Markedness
Negation
Noun phrases
Nouns
Reference (Semantic)
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:German noun phrases containing an ankle realise gender and case inflection on that article. There seems to be only a few exceptions to this rule, e.g., the indefinite article (ein) and the related negation (kein) and possessive articles (mein, dein, etc.) remain uninflected in nom.sg.msc. and nom./acc.sg.ntr. This is marked behaviour with respect to the dominating type of nominal inflection. It will be argued that there exists a markedness conflict between different structural parameters. The behaviour of the indefinite article is motivated, and thus unmarked, with respect to the structural parameters case hierarchy, gender hierarchy, and paradigmatic preferences for the form of articles. The development of noun or noun phrase inflection in language history reveals that both the emergence of the indefinite article and noun group inflection are part of a general reorganization of the formal means of nominal determination. As one result, central functions of nominal determination are formally separated from inflection. Being functional heads, the separate determiners attract other grammatical markings as well. However, the combined formal realisation of grammatical features does not involve a dependence of determination from inflection, thus the non-inflection of determiners in nom.sg.msc. and nom./acc.sg.ntr. is not marked with respect to nominal determination. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
ISSN:0301-3294
1613-0626