THE SHORT FORM OF THE ADJECTIVE IN PRESENT-DAY GERMAN IN THE LIGHT OF THE GRAMMAR THEORY OF THE WORD

Abstract

The short form of the adjective in present-day German, which stems from the Indo-European protolanguage and for that matter is found both in the Germanic and Slavic languages, in the German language took its evolutionary path along the way of the rise and establishment of the morphological features and syntactic functions re-forging itself from one of the forms of expression of a qualificator word into a representative nominator of the morphological paradigm. It widened its syntactic functioning on account of the qualitative adverb that due to the reduction of final vowels, i.e. its grammatical markers, coincided by sounding and meaning with the short form of the qualificator words. In German, these processes brought about the appearance of a new part of speech known as Artwort with the categorical meaning of the qualificator attribution. It realizes its grammatical potentialities in the substance-predicate structure of the sentence revealing in this way a bipolar functionality. Proceeding from the lexicon-centric approach to the categorical meaning of the word including the “amorphous” word of the kind of GUT an attempt is being made to describe the specificity of this type of meaning. In the opinion of the authors the categorical meaning of the “amorphous” word”, which determines its morphological paradigm and syntactic behavior, is vested at the level of the mental lexicon of the speaker as awareness and linguistic experience of using this kind of word in communication. In this way the short form of the adjectives comes in possession of all the features of the elementary sign which non-discretely combines the lexical and categorical meaning. The text-centered approach to the identification of the grammatical concept of the elementary sign reduces the word to the root morpheme. The latter attains the categorical status in its usage which is detrimental to the hierarchical construal of language. The syntactically polar bi-functionality of the short form of the adjective as the elementary sign is foregrounded in the system of actual, real and potential predications and, specifically, in the structure of Paul’s “degraded predicates” as well as in the propositions of the sentence deep structure getting explicated by means of logical implicates that represent a bipolar syntactic functionality of qualificator words. The implicit propositions reveal homonymous ties of the short form of the adjective with the first constituents of compound words which in most cases show themselves as units of the phraseological level of language structure.