Subordinativ vs. koordinativ: Zur pränominalen Strapazierfähigkeit in deutschen und dänischen Pressetexten

This article addresses (expanded) prenominal adjectival/participial attributes in modern German and modern Danish. Generally, German is considered more expandable in the prenominal position compared to Danish. However, this topic has never been studied sufficiently on an empirical basis. The article begins by giving a brief comparative survey of the structure of the NP in the respective languages. This is followed by a presentation of the corpus of the study, which consists of prose texts (newspaper articles). An important result of the analysis is that in German, the NP middle field frequently comprises subordinate structures, whereas in Danish, it more often comprises coordinate structures. This contrast is explained by different configurations of linguistic features (gender and number) that are conducive to framing constructions (Ronneberger-Sibold 2010ab).