PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

In this paper, it is argued that the principle of monoinflection governing the distribution of strong and weak adjective inflection in the New High German noun phrase (NP) definitively became established in the 18(th) century. Empirical evidence for this assumption is provided by the findings of three corpus studies based on the historical corpus (sic)Deutsches Textarchiv < (German Text Archive). Focusing on three different constructional types within the NP, the evolving distribution of strong and weak adjective inflection is studied for the period from 1600 to 1900. Based on the findings of the three corpus studies, further structural tendencies in the (re)organization of the New High German NP and their interaction with the principle of monoinflection are discussed.