A puzzling construction in German struck me this afternoon. The following sentence in German is grammatical:
Dann sagte er folgenden Satz: …
Then said he following sentence: …
‘Then he said the following sentence: …’
That is, the object of “say” here is apparently a bare singular noun phrase, consisting of just an adjective and a noun. Now, German has bare plurals like English but like English it doesn’t have bare singular (count) NPs. So, how come that sentence is grammatical?
An obvious idea is that the adjective here has morphed into something like a demonstrative determiner (used only meta-linguistically to refer to the following material). A quick Google search shows that the construction is fairly common.
I am not much of an expert on German. Has this been looked at by anyone? Do other languages (Germanic or otherwise) have special meta-linguistic, demonstrative determiners?
Could “said” be a case in point? Example from Google:
“In connection therewith, Rep. Villafuerte cited for the record that under said agreement entered into by Secretary Gonzales, it is specifically provided that “Venable will be required by US law to register with the US Department of Justice this agreement which registration must include a copy of this agreement and which is available to the public.” In other words, he said that there is nothing secret about said agreement. He asked whether this contention is correct.”
February 23rd, 2007, at 4:06 pm #Very nice. Yes, that does seem quite similar.
February 23rd, 2007, at 4:54 pm #The required syntactic testing for German requires that you check whether the definite determiner can be placed before the bare singular or not.
March 3rd, 2007, at 1:50 pm #In the example I cite, you could add a definite determiner. In general — although not in the accusative case as here — the adjective/demonstrative will have a different morphology depending on whether there is a preceding definite determiner. Here’s a nominative example from the web:
We could add a definite determiner:
Note that the ending of the adjective is different.
March 3rd, 2007, at 1:59 pm #A definite determiner can also be added in the examples with ’said’ I posted earlier. For example (from Google):
“It is provided in Article XII of the said Agreement that it shall enter into force on the date of exchange of written notices of acceptance by the Governments of the United States of America and the Socialist Republic of Romania.
March 3rd, 2007, at 8:21 pm #The determiner drop seems to be generally possible when referring meta-linguistically to things mentioned right before or after. It’s also very common with ‘ersterer’, ‘letzterer’ as in:
“Ich habe Peter, Hans und Karl vor kurzem getroffen. Ersterer lebt jetzt in Wien, zweiterer ist verheiratet, und letzterer ist ein Pfarrer.” [I recently met with Peter, Hans, and Karl. The first mentioned…, the second one…, the last one…”]. In all these cases, the definite determiner is possible as well.
March 7th, 2007, at 3:17 pm #Hello, this is my first post. Your blog is very interesting.
I am sure that Swedish has something to say about demonstrative use of determiners, but I cannot quite form together an explanation on my own, as I am not a native speaker.
I will do a little more reading to arrange my thinking.. but perhaps you would like to look in the direction of the Swedish ‘double definite’, and its system of definite-ness.
Demonstrative determiners are to be found!
March 9th, 2007, at 1:43 am #The phrase is possible in Norwegian too (”Da sa han følgende setning: …”), although of course not without “følgende”. A quick look-up in the dictionary gives the following definition of “følgende”:
følgende
a3 denne, dette, disse; neste (med f- ord / f- modeller er utsolgt)
subst (i det f- skal vi … nå, i tiden som kommer / f- dag)
“denne, dette, disse” correspond to the English determiners “this (masc/fem), this (neuter), these”, and are here given as variant meanings of “følgende”…
in addition, the word is listed as a possible noun (”substantiv”), but that might just be because it can act as the head of a determiner phrase that doesn’t have a noun, the same way that other Norwegian determiners can:
The position after “han” can be filled with a DP or an NP, where the DP has many optional subphrases. I could give you a good reference, but unfortunately it’s in Norwegian
June 10th, 2007, at 6:54 am #