Towards a uniform approach to postnominal PPs and genitives in German

Abstract

In Distributed Morphology analyses of German, genitives occurring postnominally to deverbal event nominals such as in die Beschreibung der Bürgermeisterin (‘the description of the mayoress’) are argued to occur in different syntactic positions depending on their interpretation. Whenever they are interpreted in a parallel fashion to the internal argument of the underlying verb, they are assumed to occupy some complement position internal to the nominalisation. However, if they are interpreted as more loosely associated with the event, such as in an interpretation of die Beschreibung der B¨urgermeisterin as a particular event of a description of something which the mayoress attended, they are assumed to be adjoined to the noun phrase. I argue that for lack of hard syntactic evidence with regard to these positions, we should seek a surface-oriented uniform analysis of the two interpretations. The varying interpretation of genitives is accounted for by assuming them to be introduced via an underspecified semantic relation r. The analysis is held in the framework of Underspecified Discourse Representation Theory.