THE SYNTACTIC FUNCTION OF ADJECTIVES IN GERMAN LANGUAGE ON THE EXAMPLES OF DAILY PRESS

Abstract

The aim of this paper is the analysis of adjectives in the German language system and their syntactic function in the sentence. We focus mainly on attributively used adjectives, analyzing examples from the daily press of the newspaper “Saarbrücker Zeitung” and the analyzed electronic corpus COSMAS II, from the archives of the German written language available at the German Language Institute in Mannheim (IdS). The analysis is mainly concentrated on the attributive function of adjectives in the German language, but also their language environment, because the adjectives can appear within the subject in the sentence, the direct, indirect, or prepositional object, the adverbial determination, and thus manifest attributive, predicative and adverbial use. We refer to typical, but also to less characteristic uses of the attribute, then to the changeable and unchangeable forms of the adjectives from a morphological and/or syntactic point of view. We theoretically support the analyzes with explanations from traditional grammar, and in practice, we confirm them through examples excerpted from the German daily press.      

Keywords: adjectives; attribute; gradation; linguistic environment; electronic corpus.