PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

This article discusses a case of intralingual variation in German, namely the variation in the inflection of adjectives after the so-called pronominal adjectives such as all-, manch-, sämtlich- and solch- (e.g. aller westlichen Demokratien vs. aller demokratischer Parteien; manche osteuropäische Beitrittskandidaten vs. manche kuriosen Organisationen; sämtliche politische Entscheidungen vs. sämtliche europäischen Erstaufführungen; solche heftige Diskussionen vs. solche vorpolitischen Aspekte). On the basis a corpus of newspaper texts containing more than 100 million words and responses to a questionnaire from competent speakers, we were able to determine the extent of the variation within this special area of adjective inflection and to assess which systematic factors influence this variation. The analysis of the data shows that the frequency distributions of the strong and weak adjective inflections vary both in the corpus and in the metalinguistic judgements of the informants after one and the same pronominal adjective. However, this variation is not arbitrary, rather it is determined by certain systematic factors such as case, number, government and adjacency. The implications of the results for the description and systematisation of the adjective inflection after pronominal adjectives are discussed at the end of the article.