Summary

This article provides a comparative description of the properties of the adjectival domain in Germanic, focusing on differences between continental West Germanic (German, Dutch) and North Germanic (Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish). On the one hand, it addresses the morpho-syntactic phenomenon of dual inflection as one of the major characteristics unifying adjectives in Germanic but distinguishing them from adjectives in other languages. The basic questions following from this property are the rise of dual inflection in Germanic and the principles underlying the distribution of the inflectional paradigms across the individual languages. On the other hand, this article addresses questions regarding the structural representation of the adjectival domain in Germanic. They affect not only the linear order in the Determiner Phrase (DP), that is, the positional realization of modifying adjectives relative to the head noun, but also their interpretation in terms of the underlying structure. The article provides an overview of various accounts on the structural representation of the adjectival domain in Germanic, starting with observations according to which adjectives adjoin to the head noun that they modify and ending with more recent approaches according to which adjectives display their own projections in the more articulated structure of the DP.