Postnominal adjectives in German: Small clauses, agreement, and stylistic licensing

Abstract

Postnominal adjectives in German constitute a marginal yet systematic construction that challenges canonical assumptions about DP structure and adjectival agreement. While German adjectives ordinarily appear prenominally and obligatorily inflect for case, number, and gender, expressions such as Whisky pur and Wahlkampf pur surface without inflection and with a restricted lexical inventory. In contrast, forms such as etwas Schönes display full agreement despite postnominal position. This paper develops a unified analysis in which both bare and inflected postnominals derive from DP-internal small clause structures. The noun functions as the subject of predication and the adjective as its predicate. Bare postnominals lack agreement because no φ-bearing licensing head is introduced in D°, whereas inflected postnominals arise when a pronominal or quantificational head triggers Agree. Competing analyses—fragments, apposition, and extraposition—fail to capture the agreement asymmetry, lexical restriction, and determiner interaction. The proposed account shows that German DP architecture must independently permit nominal predication distinct from attributive modification. Postnominal adjectives therefore provide direct evidence that adjectival agreement reflects structural licensing rather than linear position, and that predication inside the DP is grammatically available but stylistically constrained.