The German Adjective: The History of Its Declensions and Their Usage from the Beginning to the Present

This paper addresses the declension of adjectives in German over a period of approximately 1,275 years: from ancient German to the present. After a terminological discussion, the paper provides an overview of the morphology of adjectival inflections from a synchronic as well as a diachronic perspective. It is shown how phonological change affects the morphological paradigms towards an increasing degree of homonymy, in particular in the weak declension. I argue that the so-called Ø-forms are a key deviation from modern German. They peak in Early New High German and are particularly interesting because they could have led to simpler paradigms, but do not. They disappear from the nominal group, and are today retained only in the verbal syntax. After a systematic review of the syntactic functions and their inflectional relationships, a discussion of the use of the declension types follows. Linguistic change here navigates the tension between a functionalist-semantic and a syntactic-mechanical principle, between ‘monoflexion’ and ‘polyflexion’, between variance and linguistic normalization. The article includes questions for future research.

Keywords: Historical linguistics; Morphology; Syntax; Semantics; Adjectives; Linguistic change