Open Access

Thilo Weber

• Dieses Kapitel gibt einen Überblick über das Inventar der Ausdrücke, die zur Kategorie der Determinierer gezählt werden bzw. zumindest als Kandidaten für diese Kategorie gehandelt werden. Es untersucht ihre grammatischen Eigenschaften und überprüft ihren Determiniererstatus anhand einschlägiger morpho-syntaktischer Kriterien.
• Most noun phrases (NPs) in German contain a pre-nominal element that belongs to the category of determiner or can at least be considered a candidate for that category. Prototypical members include the articles (der/die/das ‘the’ and ein- ‘a’). Beyond that, the category contains a number of elements that resemble articles with regard to certain morpho-syntactic properties. The present chapter examines those elements from a corpus-linguistic perspective. It provides an overview of the inventory of (potential) determiners, and examines their grammatical properties and usage frequencies. It also investigates their status as determiners on the basis of morpho-syntactic criteria. Special attention is paid to the large and heterogeneous group of the so called ‘indefinites’ (e. g. einig- ‘some’, all- ‘all’, viel- ‘much/many’). Following GDS (1997), it is shown that there are central as well as peripheral members of the determiner category. The corpus-linguistic perspective shows that this type of gradualness is due to two reasons. First, an individual element may fulfil only a subset of the relevant criteria. Second, an individual criterion may be fulfilled to varying degrees.