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Usually, weak inflection of an attributive or nominalized adjective occurs if the adjective is preceded by an inflected determiner: mit diesem technischen Aufwand (‘at great technical expense’). Otherwise, the inflection of the adjective is strong: mit technischem Aufwand. Following this rule of thumb, we would expect strong inflection of an adjective following another adjective whenever the determiner is missing: mit hohem technischem Aufwand. But many German speakers opt for a weak dative singular ending -en following the strong ending -em on the first adjective: mit hohem technischen Aufwand. This chapter shows which explanatory variables play a role in this variation within standard German.
The present chapter investigates the relative order of attributive adjectives in German. Based on corpus data, our results corroborate previous findings that semantics is the most important factor in accounting for adjective order. Going beyond previous studies, we also consider coordinated structures (such as mit [[großem, verwildertem] Garten] ‘with (a) large, overgrown garden’), where both adjectives are of equal rank. While adjective order in embedded structures (mit [ schwierigem [ familiärem Hintergrund ]] ‘with (a) difficult domestic background’) can be predicted rather accurately on semantic grounds, we show that predictions can also be made for coordinated structures, albeit with lower accuracy. Using regression analysis, we examine how semantic factors interact with a number of other explanatory variables.