Abstract

Based on Eisenberg's (2000) insight that German has four genders instead of three, genitive singular inflection turns out to be driven by gender alone. The concept of inflection classes can be dispensed with for this subject. However, as has been noticed, proper names disturb this clear picture because a subset of female proper names seems to vacillate between zero inflection as is typical of female nouns and s-inflection as is typical of masculine and neuter nouns. On closer inspection, it turns out that the s-marker for female proper names differs significantly from the s-marker for masculine and neuter generic nouns. Moreover, non-female proper names may also show zero inflection in the genitive. In order to analyze these data, I distinguish two distinct classes of proper names: members of the first class of proper names are allowed to appear without an article in contexts where members of the other class need one. I call this first class ‘grammatical proper names’. In genitive singular inflection, grammatical proper names are either zero marked or marked by a specific s-marker. The conditioning factor is whether or not the head position of the DP is filled with a word.