Abstract

German noun phrases containing an article realise gender and case inflection on that article. There seems to be only a few exceptions to this rule, e.g., the indefinite article (ein) and the related negation (kein) and possessive articles (mein, dein, etc.) remain uninflected in nom.sg.msc. and nom./acc.sg.ntr. This is marked behaviour with respect to the dominating type of nominal inflection. It will be argued that there exists a markedness conflict between different structural parameters. The behaviour of the indefinite article is motivated, and thus unmarked, with respect to the structural parameters case hierarchy, gender hierarchy, and paradigmatic preferences for the form of articles. The development of noun or noun phrase inflection in language history reveals that both the emergence of the indefinite article and noun group inflection are part of a general reorganization of the formal means of nominal determination. As one result, central functions of nominal determination are formally separated from inflection. Being functional heads, the separate determiners attract other grammatical markings as well. However, the combined formal realisation of grammatical features does not involve a dependence of determination from inflection, thus the non-inflection of determiners in nom.sg.msc. and nom./acc.sg.ntr. is not marked with respect to nominal determination.