This research project is located at ACDH, research unit Linguistics.

Relational adjectives (such as richterliche Anordnung 'judicial fiat', kindliches Spielen 'children's playing') are very frequent in present-day German and in many other languages (e.g., Romance). However, little is known about their historical development in German. Although quality adjectives (as brave in brave cat) are very well described in the historical morphology of German, the morphosyntactic development of relational adjectives has never been comprehensively investigated by corpus-based studies for the diachrony of German.

The project Relational Adjectives in the History of German (RAHiG), funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF, aims to fill this research gap with respect to the emergence, the diachronic necessity, and the morphosyntactic development of relational adjectives in German by taking into account the form and semantics of the nominal phrase and especially the role of argument structure (cf. studentisches Lernen 'student-RA learning' > Student has the subject role).

Since the impact of argument structure and the head noun on the existence of relational adjectives has already been proven to hold crosslinguistically and also for present-day German, this makes this dimension a perfect starting point for further investigation of the diachrony of German. This is especially because it has been shown that relational adjectives preferentially co-occur with nominalizations and because, sometimes, a rivalry between phrases containing a relational adjective (such as kulturelle Unterstützung 'cultural support') and a compound noun (such as Kulturunterstützung lit. 'culture support') can be observed in present-day German.

Methodologically, the project comprises theoretical and empirical research by combining corpus-based studies on the (historical) stages of German and psycholinguistic experiments on present-day German, which is supported by a research cooperation with the research group Comparative Psycholinguistics from the University of Vienna. The project aim is to better understand the morpho-syntactic development of relational adjectives in the history of German and to identify potential mechanisms of a language change.