On the Definite Article in German1

Susan F. Schmerlingsusan.schmerling@gmail.com

Abstract

This paper establishes criteria for distinguishing German definite articles from demonstratives and also for distinguishing preposition-article portmanteaus (Verschmelzungen) like vom from instances of phonological reduction of articles. The paper motivates an analysis of German prepositions as combining with articles to form determiner phrases and as thereby serving as markers of oblique cases in German, usinga version of Richard Montague's extension of categorial grammar.

Keywords: German, articles, prepositions, portmanteaus, Verschmelzungen, case

0. This paper is a study in noun-phrase morphology, and as a study in morphology it will naturally involve some phonology, some syntax, and some semantics. The German definite article of my title is interestingly different from English the in that it is not something with an invariant form but is rather a family of forms. Like determiners generally in German its form in a given expression is a function both of the gender/number class of the noun with which it is construed and of the case of the NP of which it is a part; wecannot understand German article morphology without a theory of case inflection. I will outline such a theory in this paper, and I will use it to explain what it is about German that allows its definite article to have a property that has up to now seemed baffling: the fact that certain forms of the article appear to be fusions of a dative or an accusative article and a preposition. The theory analyzes prepositions as case inflections or components of case inflections: there are no syntactic categories Preposition or Prepositional Phrase. The theory has as a consequence that all NP’s in German are syntactically derived; there are no basic NP’s. There is independent syntactic and semantic evidence that expressions used as NP’s but lacking any overt determiner or article get NP-type meanings in a way that is

1 This paper is a November, 1988, revision of a paper presented at the Symposium on Determiners and A’ Binding, Austin, March 22-24, 1985; some of the work herein was presented in earlier incarnations at the Conference on the Phonology of Morphology, Austin, April 7-8, 1984; at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in July, 1984; and in the University of Texas at Austin syntax/semantics discussion group in February, 1985. I would like to thank the members of those audiences for their comments; they will note changes between what I have presented earlier and what is presented herein, which changes are to be regarded as corrections. I am especially indebted to Irene Heim both for continual valuable feedback and for her labors as an informant. Thanks too to my other informants, especially Werner Frey, Oliver Gajek, Manfred Pinkal, and Karoline Schmitt; to Erhard Hinrichs for making available a prepublication copy of Hinrichs 1984; and to Bill Ladusaw, Barbara Partee, and ManfredPinkal for valuable discussion. Comments are eagerly solicited; please do not quote without author’s permission.

exactly parallel to the way an NP introduced by the definite article gets a meaning.

In order to accomplish the mission of this paper it will be necessary to establish the existence of a class of definite articles that is not included in the class of determiners. Commonplace allusions to a definite article in German notwithstanding, it is clear that if standard German has a definite article its segmental makeup is invariably identical to that of what is clearly a demonstrative determiner like English that. My argument that an article/demonstrative distinction must be made is based in large measure on facts about the preposition-article fusions; it will therefore first be necessary to establish that these are something other than ordinary prepositions followed by phonologically reduced articles. The special semanticcharacter of NP’s introduced by the definite article emerges in this sorting-out exercise.

The goal of understanding German preposition-article fusion as well as the goal of understanding case inflection in languages like German constitute the original theoretical justification for the enterprise undertaken here. On standard approaches, both fusion and case morphology have been seen as necessitating ad-hoc enrichments of linguistic theory, and the kind of fusion German illustrates has not previously, to my knowledge, been related to its case system. The overall theory in which my own investigation is done is one Ihave been developing over the last several years and have been calling phonologically based categorical grammar (see especially Schmerling 1982, 1983a,b,c). We will see that phonologically based categorical grammar explainspreposition-article fusions in the sense that the theory would have to be ad-hocly complicated to rule them out. The category theory I use is in essentialslike the version of categorical grammar that Montague used in PTQ (1973), and in it, as I have emphasized in previous papers, so-called feature percolation of the sort illustrated by German case inflection is an automatic consequence of the definition of “derived category” (or “slash category”).

The account of the German definite article I am about to present is at odds with a proposal concerning the preposition-article fusions that has appeared in the literature in a couple of guises. Emmon Bach, writing in his generalized categorical grammar framework, suggested without argument (1983) that these items belong to a syntactic category of their own, which, oversimplifying a bit, we may notate PP/N/ An analogous proposal within an X’-theory approach—GPSG—was made by Erhard Hinrichs in a paper devoted specifically to the fusions (1984). We will see that proposals of this sort are inadequate.

1. In PTQ, Montague realized that his categorial syntax laid the foundation for a theory of case since, as David Dowty has emphasized in a serious of important works (see especially Dowty 1982), a categorial grammar like his that does not use language-particular formal operations in the category theory

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itself allows us to define grammatical relations language-independently. Montague’s approach, of course, was fundamentally to use Russell’s theory of types as the indexing mechanism for the family of meaningful expressions of a language: the category indices thus guarantee than an expression of arbitrary syntactic complexity has a compositional semantic interpretation in an arbitrary model.2 As he recognized, however, the type-theoretically characterized categories of a particular language may be subdivided on formal grounds; we may thus take the category indices to be, say, type-integer pairs.In the present paper the two basic categories are taken to e the clause category and the property category; we will have no reason to get “lower” thanproperty expressions. Because there are both different kinds of clause—indicative, infinitival, etc.—and different kinds of property expression—verbs, nouns, and adjectives—both of these categories are also split on my approach; the subcategory indices then enter into the definition of derived category indices. As in PTQ, I will take intransitive verbs and nouns (and also adjectives) to be property expressions; the subject is thus the functor expression in a clause.

Syntactic motivation for setting things up in the way I have just outlined maybe seen by considering the analysis of the English indicative clause in (1), which builds on Dowty’s work and my own earlier work.3

We know we must recognize a special subcategory of canonical indicative clauses, here abbreviated IC. If the subject is the functor expression of a clause then we automatically have a derived category index IC/IV: the categoryof nominative subjects. This is correct: the formal marking of subjects differs in different clause types. I have justified this analysis of clauses elsewhere (1983b,c) and will simply note here that indicative verbal

2 The reason is that the types function as a basis for set theory, and a model structure is constructed set-theoretically.3 The PTQ-style analysis trees in this paper differ from Montague’s in one crucial respect: while the boldface expressions in his trees were intended to represent expressions of orthographic English, I am using orthographic representations strictly for convenience. Thus, for me, each node of an analysis tree is an orthographic representation of a phonological structure, indexed by syntactic category.

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inflection is taken to result from a composite clause-forming operation: the subject combines with an expression that is derived from an uninflected IV by substitution of its initial prosodic word. Unlike subject categories, the IV category in this system is not itself defined with reference to a particular clause category. The nominative-subject catgory illustrates how what has been called feature percolation is automatically provided for given the categorial-grammar approach to functor expressions.

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The tree in (1) reflects an analysis of English as having one real unmarked case and a special nominative case. In fact, with the exception of personal pronouns, which are independently idiosyncratic (and, I will assume, syncategorematic), any unmarked-case NP can function as a nominative NP. The converse is not true, since certain NP’s can function only as nominative NP’s:in colloquial English, for example, NP’s like only John and even John are specifically nominative. The present theory makes sense of this situation, since we see that applying zero-derivation to unmarked-case NP’s is just one way of deriving nominative NP’s. I will also note in passing that the theory does not require all syntactically analyzed clauses to have nominative subjects. ENGLISH requires this but German, for example, does not in its so-called impersonal constructions like (2):

(2) Hier wird getanzt. ‘Here there is dancing.‘

here is danced

Apart from the fact that Mary in (1) (as well as John) is not analyzed as a basic NP, in accordance with one of the results of this paper, the remainder of (2) largely follows Dowty. Specifically, the preposition to is analyzed as syncategorematic: this element is added by a composite transitive-verb deriving operation that is in fact formally analogous to the operation deriving the whole clause. As operations of this sort are widely attested,4 there appears to be no need to set up a special “dative NP” category for English. What is special about to is, on this approach, the fact that its addition involves the particular kind of formal modification of an NP that it does. The primitive to-prefixing operation that enters into the composite transitive-verb deriving operation illustrated in (1) is definable because, regardless of the internal makeup of an NP, the to is invariably added at its left periphery. Japanese is one example of a language in which case-marking particles are added at the right periphery of NP’s. I will return to the question of whether Dowty’s approach to to is generalizable to the whole classof prepositions.

4 See especially Schmerling 1983a for discussion of this point.

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German case-marking is not like English or Japanese case-marking but is instead of a type illustrated by other conservative Indo-European languages (inter alias). In German-type languages we find cases that are marked not by an NP-peripheral particle but rather by NP-internal morphology. The examples in (3) illustrate this: some prefatory comments first. German is traditionallydescribed as having two numbers, three genders, and four cases, called nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative. There are in fact no gender distinctions in the plural, which may, as far as NP-internal morphology is concerned, be thought of as a fourth gender. Only in the masculine (singular) is there a formal nominative/accusative distinction, and I have therefore chosen masculine nouns to illustrate German case inflection in (3).

(3)a. Nom: der rote Ball ‘the/that red ball’ Gen: des roten Balls

Dat: dem roten Ball Acc: den roten Ball

b. Nom: ein roter Ball ‘a red ball’ Gen: eines roten Balls

Dat: einem roten Ball Acc: einen roten Ball

c. Nom: alter Wein ‘old wine’ Gen: alten Weins Dat: altem Wein Acc: alten Wein

It can be observed in these examples that the burden of distinguishing cases is borne largely by the determiner, if there is one, or by adjective inflection where there is no overt determiner, as can happen if the noun is a mass noun or a plural (the count/mass distinction cross-cuts gender distinctions, and, of course, an NP need not contain any adjectives). As far as noun inflection is concerned only a genitive/non-genitive distinction is made in (3), and this is in fact a peculiarity of the particular noun class illustrated here (the so-called strong masculine nouns). Adjective inflection is strictly a function of the choice of determiner: (3a-c) illustrate three different patterns of adjective inflection. Overt determiners trigger either the (a) pattern or the (b) pattern, and which triggers which seems not to correlate with any hitherto recognized semantic distinction such as definiteness but is apparently an idiosyncrasy of a given determiner. (I am, incidentally, taking the definite article to be a determiner for purposes of the present exposition.) Although I will henceforth ignore adjectives for simplicity’s sake, it should be borne in mind that determiners function in tandem with adjective inflection: I have in fact argued (1984) that German attributive adjectives are to be analyzed as complements of determiners, so that this inflection is yet another instance of a functor expression governing

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the morphology of its complement. Predicate adjectives in German are uninflected.5

It should be apparent why German case inflection cannot be treated analogouslyto English or Japanese case inflection: we could not define a case-marking operation analogous to addition of to without in effect redoing the derivational history of an NP. We must syntactically build up NP’s that are specifically nominative, accusative, etc. In other words, we must split the NPcategory into case subcategories in a way that does not mirror the nominative/unmarked distinction we make in English. This very move will ultimately permit the preposition-article fusions if prepositions are a kind of case-marking.

5 On the account I propose in Schmerling 1984, recursion of adjectives takes place in a complex determiner category: I am assuming a system of semantic interpretation like that presented in Bach and Cooper 1978. Note that if an NP has more than one adjective, all are inflected in the same way. (It is this fact about adjective inflection that makes a more traditional analysis whereby adjectives form a constituent with the noun they modify both unwieldy and unrevealing.)

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What happens if we split the NP category in the way I have just suggested? Theanswer is that, just as splitting of the clause category automatically definessubject categories keyed to clause categories, so splitting of the NP categoryinto case categories automatically defines determiner categories keyed to NP-case categories. The trees in (4)-(7) illustrate this. To keep my presentationfollowable I will deal only with strong masculine nouns in my illustrative analyses (though not necessarily in my examples); obviously case inflection cannot ultimately be considered apart from gender/number.6

The trees in (4)-(7) ilustrate the category indices assigned to determiners, abstracting away from adjectives.

It must now be noted that I have glossed the orthographically unitary expressions in (3a) as ‘the red ball’ or ‘that red ball’. If der, des, dem, orden is accented in (3a) there is no question that it functions as a demonstrative analogous to that. I will suggest below that the forms cited in (3a) are not genuinely ambiguous—that the demonstratives are independent, accentable words while the articles, with the same segmental makeup, are pretonic clitics. If the (3a) expressions are actually thought of as ambiguous, that ambiguity is resolved in certain prepositional constructions. This brings us to the preposition-article fusions.

6 I am assuming that the /s/ ending on genitive nouns of the strong-masculine class is suffixed in the operation deriving the genitive NP. The primitive inflection operationinvolved is definable because the noun will always be the first word of the CN expression, assuming the analysis of adjectives as complements of determiners.

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2. Hinrichs, in his paper on the fusions (1984), states that virtually all prepositions and definite articles in German enter into corresponding fusionalforms (he does not make the article/demonstrative distinction I am making) andargues against these forms’ involving phonological contraction of the article.One of his arguments, which I will not go into here, assumes that articles would have to be contracted by a series of Stampean “lenitions”. I will not make that assumption since article contraction is a matter of speech STYLE rather than tempo. As Hinrichs observes, definite-article forms ending in a consonant do reduce quite generally in German, not specifically after prepositions; one may note, as Hinrichs did not, that some special apparatus would be required to PREVENT article reduction after prepositions even if a special syntactic category for the fusions were set up. My own hypothesis as to what this reduction consists in is that it is applicable to articles whose (single) syllable contains a coda and that it involves the loss of all but thecoda.7 I assume an analogous account of the English auxiliary reduction illustrated in (8):

(8)a. The student’s come.

b. The students’ve come.

Hinrichs’ second argument against a phonological account is that one may observe meaning differences between the full forms and the forms he analyzes as fusions. This semantic claim is borne out by my own research, but, importantly, only when a particular subset of the prepositions is considered. My own claim is that we must cut things up along the lines indicated in (9) and (10):

(9) Preposition-article fusions

a. with prepositions governing dative case: im, am, vom, beim, zum, zur

7 There seem to be differences in regional standards as regards reduction of der (whichalso functions as the feminine genitive and dative article). Though ‘r is cited by Hinrichs, it is alien to the principal informants I have consulted on this point, all of whom are from southern Germany (these speakers do, however, have the fusional form zur). Since this segment is actually an off-glide phonetically, and since it can be followed in a syllable by segments of high sonority, it seems best to regard it as part of a complex syllable nucleus rather than as a coda (I am indebted to Irene Heim for discussion on this point); my characterization of article reduction in this paper as involving retention of codas is essentially done in deference to my informants. Obviously, further research is required here. (Comparison of Hinrichs’ examples as well as the ones I have elicited with examples cited in Haberland 1985—which article was most graciously brought to my attention by Manfred Pinkal—indicates additional variation.)

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b. with prepositions governing accusative case: ins, ans, fürs, ums, … (all monosyllabic prepositions in this class when construed with a neuter object)

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(10) Prepositioons followed by reduced articles: aus’m, mit’m, übern, übers, gegens, …

The clearest case for a distinction involves the three forms im, am, and vom.The prepositions in their plain forms are, respectively, in, an, and von: simple reduction of the masculine/neuter article dem, if this involves what happens generally with article reduction, would yield the forms in (11):

(11) in’m, an’m, von’m

In fact these forms do exist, but they involve reduction of the indefinite article einem. One may observe two kinds of reduction of in the dissyllabic forms of the indefinite article. The kind that is characteristic of northern speakers involves loss of the initial syllable, yielding atonic forms like those in (12):

(12) ‘ne, ‘ner, ‘nes, ‘nem, ‘nen

For the southern speakers I have worked with the dissyllabic forms that end incodas are reduced further, in a way that seems to be completely analogous to reduction of the definite article forms: it is this reduction that is illustrated in (11). Thus for both groups of speakers there must be some othersource for im, am, and vom. Because these cases are the clearest-cut I will use them in establishing the relevant semantic distinction. It is noteworthy that Hinrichs limited his semantic discussion to forms drawn from (9).

Hinrichs observes that when what he refers to as the definite article is “used deictically” the fusions do not occur. An example of the sort he had in mind is given in (13):

(13) Ich arbeite in dém Krankenhaus. ‘I work in thát hospital’

On my account the dem in (13) is a demonstrative.

Hinrichs also observes what he calls an “anaphoric use” of the “definite article”; here again we do not find fusion:

(14) Siehst du das Krankenhaus dort? Ich habe oft in dem Krankenhaus gearbeitet.

‘Do you see that hospital there? I’ve often worked in that hospital’

I believe that we would want to say that (13) and both sentences of (14) involve deixis, the difference being that only (13) and the first sentence of (14) involve actual pointing. In (14) the phrase in dem Krankenhaus is subject to so-called anaphoric destressing.8

8 While the recognition of an article/demonstrative distinction is not original with me, to my knowledge the demonstrative character of the items under discussion has

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A third “use” of the definite article that Hinrichs recognizes is what he calls the generic use, and here we find fusion. Consider example (15):

(15) Meine Schwester is sehr krank. Sie ist jetzt im Krankenhaus. ‘My sister is very sick. She is now in (the) hospital (i.e.,

hospitalized)’

One can, however, construct examples containing a phrase like im Krankenhaus where the interpretation is not generic. Example (16) is due to Heim:

(16) Ich habe gestern meinen Regenschirm im Krankenhaus vergessen. ‘Yesterday I left my umbrella at the hospital’

The key to understanding (16) lies, I believe, in the fact that (16) would be uttered in a context where there is a hospital that one would quite generally refer to, in the nominative or accusative, as dăs Kránkenhaus—say, a hospital where one worked, or where one was regularly visiting a patient. This kind of context is such that a unique reference for das Krankenhaus can be assumed inferable without the use of deixis, just as can be done with generics.

I conclude that there is a formal definite article/demonstrative distinction to be made in German and that this distinction correlates with a semantic distinction familiar from English. We can thus use this semantic distinction as a test for whether a given form is a preposition-article fusion or an instance of phonological reduction of an article. Contrast the im~in dem case with the case of another preposition, aus:

(17) Sie ist endlich aus dem Krankenhaus gekommen ‘She finally came out of the/that hospital’

Modulo prosody, aus dem Krankenhaus in (17) is open to the same pair of interpretations as the examples in (3a). Example (18), involving article reduction, shares an interpretation with (17):

(18) Sie ist endlich aus’m Krankenhaus gekommen ‘She finally came out of the/a hospital’

It is this semantic test that is the basis for the taxonomy given in (9) and (10). Of particular interest here is the class of prepositions governing the accusative case, since there would appear to be no way to decide on acoustic grounds whether forms like ins and gegens involve fusion or reduction of the neuter article das. Exhausting if not fully exhaustive work with my major

previously been recognized only when they carry an actual accent. That demonstratives can be unaccented in German becomes clear when one observes that lack of an accent is quite possible with forms of dies- ‘this’. (German prosody is analogous to that of English in all respects relevant to this paper.)

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informant, Irene Heim, suggests the monosyllabic/polysyllabic distinction I have given as a hypothesis there. The judgments are more subtle in this instance but they are also shared by the other native speakers I have consulted; consider the minimal pair of minimal pairs in (19) and (20), constructed by Heim:

(19)a. Alte Leute denken immer ans Sterben. ‘Old people always think about dying’

b. ?Alte Leute denken immer an das Sterben.

(20)a. Alte Leute reden immer übers Sterben. ‘Old people always talk about dying’

b. Alte Leute reden immer über das Sterben.

The difference between (20a) and (20b) is purely one of style; two of my informants have independently volunteered that (19b) feels like a hypercorrection, and this is a judgment that is shared generally.

Monosyllabicity thus appears to be a necessary condition on the preposition-article fusions. This is the kind of condition we expect to find on clitic-hood. It is not the kind of condition we expect to find on membership in a syntactic category, and this is one reason for regarding Bach’s and Hinrichs’ proposals with suspicion.

3. There is a more blatant problem with the proposal that preposition-article fusions belong to their own syntactic category. Having a special PP/N categoryfor these (or a phrase-structure analogue) will not in and of itself do anything to rule out the relevant prepositions’ introducing NP’s beginning with the relevant articles. The semantic considerations I have discussed show that the fusional forms actually fill a paradigm gap.

We may also note that if PP is a category distinct from NP then proposals of Bach-Hinrichs sort destroy the unity of the NP category. But in fact there arereasons to be suspicious of a PP category.

Since the advent of X’ approaches to syntax there has been a tendency to thinkof PP as representing an adjunct or modifier category. One way in which this is suspicious is that certain modifiers, like yesterday in English, are not introduced by an overt preposition. Saying that an adverb like yesterday contains a phonologically empty preposition begs a serious question: why should it be only in the PP category that the head can be required to be empty, just in case it has a certain complement? There is no precedent for this in the VP, NP, and AP categories. A second way in which this approach is suspicious is that we must say that some nouns, verbs, and adjectives are sub-categorized for PP complements WITH PARTICULAR HEADS. This fact was recognized as

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early as Chomsky 1965, but its anomalous nature has not been emphasized. Nor has there been much emphasis placed on a third anomaly arising in X’ approaches: P is a closed class of items, quite unlike the V, N, and A classes. Everyone knows this, of course, but we would like to know a reason for this difference.

In a language with morphological case-marking like German it is especially clear that no case-marked NP/preposition-phrase distinction correlates with anargument/modifier distinction. Certain kinds of adverbs look exactly like case-marked NP’s, such as the unambiguously accusative jeden Tag ‘every day’. And just as in English, certain verbs, nouns, and adjectives require complements introduced by particular prepositions: the verb abhängen ‘depend’,for example, requires a complement introduced by von, just as English depend requires a complement introduced by on.

We can make sense of this situation if we are willing to take the plunge and accept the proposition in (21):

(21) Prepositions ARE case-marking.

What we will also have to assume is the set of ancillary assumptions in (22). I submit that we either already know the propositions in (22) to be true or should welcome them on cross-linguistic grounds:

(22)a. Verbs, nouns, and adjectives may require their complements to be case- marked in a particular way.

b. A modifying expression with a particular kind of meaning may be derived from an NP with a particular case-marking (thus certain adpositions or traditional cases sometimes appear to be meaningful themselves).

c. Non-exotic as well as exotic languages have large numbers of cases.

d. Non-exotic as well as exotic languages may have complex cases that can be analyzed as derived from morphologically primary case-marked forms.

This plunge is a natural one to take in the kind of categorial grammar I have adopted, since a PP category is in fact not congenial to that theory whereas all the necessary plunge apparatus is already there.

The major difference between English and German that we have seen is that English has one unmarked, or primary, case, whereas German has four primary cases. To account for these we assumed that the NP category, and therefore thedeterminer category, is split into case sub-categories. We now see that we

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also want to recognize cases in German that we might name the von case, the in-dative case, the in-accusative case, etc. Continuing the category-splitting approach that is motivated by the primary cases, then, we arrive at an analysis of an expression like von einem Ball like that given in (23):

As the tree in (21) indicates, we may derive a complex-case determiner like von einem from any dative-case determiner by prefixing von. We will want rules like this for all the prepositions.

The proposal I have just made entails that definite articles cannot belong to the general category of determiners: if they did we would wrongly predict, e.g., von dem as a von-case article. But suppose all article forms are introduced syncategorematically: this is independently motivated if the primary-case articles are indeed proclitics, since their addition then involves a special kind of operaton. Then we have derivations like those in (24)-(26):

The complex-case definite articles are, on this approach, always added by an operation that is, WITH THE FUSIONAL EXCEPTIONS WE SPECIFY, the composition of prefixation of a preposition and

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prefixation of a definite article. The correct way, them, to view the preposition-article fusions is that they, like sequences of prepositions and primary-case articles, ARE articles.

4. I have presented an analysis of German case whereby prepositions are not added to full NP’s. This analysis has an important consequence: ALL lexical NP’s are built up from nouns.

In northern varieties of standard German proper nouns generally are not used with articles in the primary cases. This situation is reminiscent of English, where most categorial approaches, following Montague’s, have treated such names as basic NP expressions and have assumed a semantics for them that amounts to analyzing them as picking out entities in a model, where “entities”are of a lower type than properties. If such an approach were correct for German we would not have an obvious analysis of complex-case NP’s like von Peter. On my approach Peter must fundamentally be of the same category as the category of common nouns. The special subcategory to which nouns like Peter belong is such that a primary-case NP with a definite interpretation is derived from such a noun by identity. Of course the composition of, e.g., von-prefixation and identity is just von-prefixation.

In fact, we have good reason, apart from prepositions, to say that it is possible to build up proper NP’s in German. (27) lists the name of a popular German magazine in its four primary cases, and its form varies as we would expect:

(27) Nom: “Der Spiegel” Gen: des “Spiegels” Dat: dem “Spiegel” Acc: den “Spiegel”

NP’s like (27) are unique in their reference and so we expect to find exactly what we find in (28):

(28) Das habe ich im “Spiegel” gesehen. ‘I saw that in Der Spiegel’

Sentence (29) is perfectly grammatical,

(29) Das habe ich in dem “Spiegel“ gesehen ‘I saw that in that Spiegel’

But here we are talking about a particular issue or copy of Der Spiegel. It is clear that this is a special case of the more general fact that Spiegel can function as an ordinary count noun, taking all the appropriate determiners:

(30)a. der “Spiegel” ‘that Spiegel (nom.)’

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b. dieser “Spiegel” ‘this Spiegel (nom.)’

c. ein “Spiegel” ‘a Spiegel (nom.)’

d. mein “Spiegel” ‘my Spiegel (nom.)’

The English glosses given in (30) are interesting themselves, in fact, and I will return to such examples.

My investigation of sentences with preposition-article fusions has led me to hypothesize that supposedly basic NP’s in German work semantically just like those introduced with the definite article. One piece of evidence for this stems from an observation of Heim’s. Of the two sentences in (31), only (31a) has an epithetical interpretation:

(31)a. Peter ruft mich dauernd an, aber ich will von dem Idioten nichts wissen. ‘Peter calls me up constantly, but I don’t want to hear from that idiot’

b. Peter ruft mich dauernd an, aber ich will vom Idioten nichts wissen.

Heim’s original intuition was that (31b) would have to involve some idiot other than Peter. There is, however, one kind of situation in which Peter and vom Idioten can corefer, and that is if Peter has the nickname Der Idiot. In this instance (31b) would have much the same flavor as the English sentence (32):

(32) People are always speculating about Frank Sinatra’s connections with organized crime, but I prefer to think of Old Blue-Eyes as a fine crooner.

This result in unsurprising in view of the acceptability of (33):

(33) Peter ruft mich dauernd an, aber ich will von Peter nichts wissen.

A second piece of evidence comes from so-called donkey sentences. Consider (34):

(34) Jeder Mann, der einen Esel besitzt, wird von ihm geehrt.

‘Every man who owns a donkey is honored by it’

(34) contains a pronoun; if we replace it by a lexical NP, that NP must involve deixis, as we would expect:

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(35) Jeder Mann, der einen Esel besitzt, wird von dem Esel geehrt.

Just as we cannot get a “donkey-sentence” interpretation for a sentence like (36) in a situation where the men all happen to own donkeys named Peter, we cannot get such an interpretation for (37):

(36) Jeder Mann, der einen Esel besitzt, wird von Peter geehrt.

(37) Jeder Mann, der einen Esel besitzt, wird vom Esel geehrt.

There is also further evidence that German proper nouns are not basic NP’s. Consider the possessive construction illustrated in (38):

(38) Peters Buch ‘Peter’s book’

Possessive determiners in contemporary German are based on pronouns—in which case their form varies just as the form of the indefinite article varies—or else are derived from anarthrous proper nouns by the addition of /s/.9 (38) isnot analogous to its English gloss: one cannot add /s/ to NP’s generally to form a possessive determiner. If Peter were basically a full NP we would expectto be able to do this.

It has long been observed for English that proper nouns can be “used as commonnouns”, though the fact that this is fully productive is one that has generally gone unappreciated (in my own earlier work as well as in others’). Consider the examples in (39):

(39)a. There are four Sams in this office.

b. There’s no Sam at this address.

c. Nearly half the apartments on the fourth floor have a Sam living in them.

d. Every Sam in this office probably wishes the other Sams had other names.

e. We’re not talking about the same Sam.

There is exactly one gap in the paradigm from which the Sam NP’s in (39) are drawn: we do not get *the Sam. This gap, I submit, is filled by Sam as a complete NP. People who live in the kinds of situations alluded to in the

9 This is completely productive except that the /s/-adding operation is undefined for nouns that already end in /s/, such as Hans. The same operation is the productive one for deriving noun plurals: it is used for pluralizing both proper nouns and borrowed common nouns (as in das Auto, die Autos, etc.).

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examples in (39) are usually acutely aware that in them one cannot felicitously utter a sentence like (40) out of the blue:

(40) Have you seen Sam?

(40) is infelicitous in exactly the same way (41) would be without further context:

(41) Have you seen the movie?

If Sam qua noun picks out the property of being a Sam, then Sam qua NP is no more and no less than a definite description. The difference between a noun like Sam and a noun like Times would appear to be simply that Times cannot be an NP in its own right but must acquire a The.10

Exactly analogous facts hold for anarthrous names in German. On the account I have proposed in this paper, then, there are two kinds of noun in German: those that enter into primary-case definite descriptions by the addition of anactual article, and those that enter into a primary-case definite description by zero derivation. Either way, a definite NP is derived according to a rule that, in Montague’s terminology, is not a rule of functional application.

An added benefit of the approach I am advocating emerges when we consider the fact that the DISTRIBUTION of the definite article in German is not exactly parallel to the distribution of the English definite article. We can make sense of this situation in the following way: while both languages syntactically distinguish two kinds of noun insofar as the derivation of derivation of definite descriptions is concerned, since in each language the distinction is semantically arbitrary cases can arise where an anarthrous nounin the one language would be glossed with a noun that required an article in the other.11

10 Thanks to Barbara Partee for bringing to my attention that the same point about English proper nouns was made in Sloat 1969.

I am assuming that if a distinction is to be made between rigid and non-rigid designators then that distinction is one to be made between two kinds of definite description. I take the existence of nouns like Times to be prima-facie evidence that such a distinction is not one that can correlate with a syntactic distinction.11 In describing this distinction as “semantically arbitrary”, I mean specifically thatthe distinction has no bearing on whether or not the noun can head a definite description. Some SORTALLY based regularities may be found in each language: both English and German naming conventions, for example, are such that names of rivers takearticles (the Danube, der Donau). A comparison of the German deverbal nouns in (19) and (20) with the gerunds I have used in the English glosses indicates one area of difference between the two languages; another may be seen in a comparison of the titleof Haberland 1985 and its contemporary English gloss, which would include fusion of preposition and definite article in (*the) German.

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Given the approach to proper nouns that I have just outlined, we can see that there is no reason in principle why a language would have to make a distinction between proper and common nouns. In southern dialects of German, in fact, the distinction is not made, just as it is not made in numerous languages with and without articles. To round out the German picture I offer sentence (42), which is also due to Heim, who recalls it as something that might have been said in her own family in Munich:

(42) Das habe ich vom Walter gehört. ‘I heard that from Walter’

An expression like von dem Walter would, of course, mean ‘from that Walter’.

5. I have argued in this paper for a particular analysis of German and for a theory. For German, I have argued for a class of definite articles distinct from demonstratives, for a class of preposition-article fusions distinct from cases of phonological reduction, for a particular approach to case inflection,and for a unitary class of nouns subsuming proper and common nouns. This has been possible because of a theory that encompasses morphology, syntax, and compositional semantics and that tells us how we can—and cannot—use morphologyto discover syntactic and semantic structure.

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References

Bach, E. 1983. Generalized categorial grammars and the English auxiliary. In Heny and Richards 1983.

Bach, E. and R. Cooper. 1978. The NP-S analysis of relative clauses and compositional semantics. Linguistics and Philosophy 2. 145-50.

Chomsky, N. 1965. Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Dowty, D.R. 1982. Grammatical Relations and Montague grammar. In P. Jacobson and G. Pullum, eds., The nature of syntactic representation. Dordrecht: Reidel.

Haberland, H. 1985. Zum Problem der Verschmelzung von Präposition und bestimmten Artikel im Deutschen. Osnabrücker Beiträge zur Sprachtheorie 30.82-106.

Heny, F. and B. Richards, eds., Linguistic categories: Auxiliaries and relatedpuzzles, vol. 2. Dordrecht: Reidel.

Hinrichs, E.W. 1984. Attachment of articles and prepositions in German: Simplecliticization or inflected prepositions. In A. Zwicky and R. Wallace, eds.,Working papers in linguistics no. 29: Papers on morphology. Columbus: Department of Linguistics, The Ohio State University.

Montague, R. 1973. The proper treatment of quantification in ordinary English.In J. Hintikka, J. Moravcsik, and P. Suppes, eds., Approaches to natural language. Dordrecht: Reidel. Reprinted in R. Thomason, ed., Formal philosophy: Selected papers of Richard Montague. New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 1974.

Schmerling, S.F. 1982. The proper treatment of the relationship between syntaxand phonology. Texas Linguistic Forum 19. 151-166.

Schmerling, S.F. 1983a. Montague Morphophonemics. In J.F. Richardson, M. Marks, and A. Chukerman, eds., Papers from the parasession on the interplayof phonology, morphology, and syntax. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.

Schmerling, S.F. 1983b. A new theory of English auxiliaries. In Heny and Richards 1983.

Schmerling, S.F. 1983c. Two theories of syntactic categories. Linguistics and Philosophy 6. 393-421.

Schmerling, S.F. 1984. Inflectional morphology without features. Presented at the Eastern States Conference on Linguistics. The Ohio State University.

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Sloat, C. 1969. Proper nouns in English. Language 45. 26-30.

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