Resolving unexpected case concord in German A–N–N compounds

Abstract German A(djective)–N(oun)–N(oun) compounds exhibit unexpected internal inflection. The main purpose of this paper is to account for the interesting fact that the adjective in German A–N–N compounds shows several options to inflect for case. It can either agree with the first noun, with the second noun, or with neither of them. A production-task experiment confirms the existence of all three patterns. This is an important result since from a theoretical perspective, agreement of the adjective with the second noun is unexpected because it seems to violate standard locality conditons. Ou... Mehr ...