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Article: Studies from University of Canterbury update current data on life sciences.
- Article from:
- Life Science Weekly
- Article date:
- January 13, 2009
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"Among the patterns of declension exhibited by German nouns and adjectives, there are some that are traditionally labelled 'weak'," scientists writing in the journal Natural Language & Linguistic Theory report (see also Life Sciences).
"It is argued here that the behaviour of 'weak' noun and adjective forms can be best understood if their inflectional suffixes are regarded not as expressing morphosyntactic properties such as gender and case but rather as the outcome of conflicting ranked constraints governing what an optimal noun or adjective should look like in different contexts. For example, an attributive adjective should carry a suffix; a nominative singular ...