This article attempts to put a new spin on (the development of) weakly inflected adjectives, with a particular focus on North Germanic, by recycling some traditional ideas. Point of departure is the observation that the Proto-Norse demonstrative hinn had ended up as a functional element in the extended adjectival projection in Old Icelandic – not as a definite article in the extended nominal projection (an otherwise well-known grammaticalization process). Following the old idea that weak inflection originally involved nominalization, it is argued that weak “adjectives” maintained their nominal status beyond Proto-Germanic. Thus the grammaticalizing article originating from the demonstrative hinn occurs as a determiner with a weak “adjective” that really projects a nominal phrase. At some stage prior to Old Icelandic, this constellation is reanalyzed in its entirety, at the phrasal level, from nominal phrase to adjectival phrase, a process in which the original demonstrative gets “trapped” inside the adjectival projection and is reanalyzed as adjectival article. Only after this process of phrasal reanalysis can we speak of weak adjectives proper. 1. Weak adjectival inflection in Germanic One common Germanic innovation is the development of two adjectival paradigms, traditionally referred to as strong and weak inflection (after Grimm 1837). The distinction strong vs. weak as such has survived – to various degrees – into most modern Germanic languages, where they however display different synchronic functions. In modern German, for instance, the inflection of an (attributive) adjective is essentially determined by morphology/morphosyntax, whereas in Scandinavian, weakly inflected adjectives occur in contexts that can be characterized as semantically definite. The emergence of the weak inflection has been extensively discussed since the 19th century. It is widely accepted that both weak adjectives and weak nouns originally involved a stem formation element, or rather, a derivational suffix ‘-n-’. One of the most prominent suggestions concerning the original function of the suffix, “individualization”, essentially boils down to nominalization, morphosyntactically speaking. Indeed, the nominal character of weak adjectives has been repeatedly pointed out. In some sense, however, none of those accounts has taken the syntactic consequences insofar as the respective discussions always revolve around the opposition strong vs. weak adjective. In this article, I will take the nominalizing aspect seriously and argue that this is a false dichotomy: weak “adjectives” are nominal in nature, that is of category N, in early Germanic, and consequently, they project some noun phrase rather than an adjectival phrase. I will start out by discussing the situation in Old Icelandic where weak adjectives systematically cooccur with the adjectival article (h)inn thus constituting an adjectival phrase. Weak adjectives themselves are “defective”, i.e. incomplete adjectival phrases, and (h)inn functions as an adjectival complementizer. This leads to the question of how this constellation could come about, namely, that it is the sequence (h)inn – a former demonstrative – plus a weak adjective that forms a weak adjectival phrase proper, rather than the weak adjective on its own. The answer that I will provide is that the same sequence, at a previous stage, constituted a nominal phrase with the weak “adjective” as its head noun. In order to advance this idea, I will start out at the other end of the diachronic spectrum and sketch the development from Proto-Indo-European (PIE) towards Old Icelandic arguing that weak “adjectives” emerged via phrasal reanalysis from nominal c © Alexander Pfaff. Nordlyd 44.1: 19-34, CGSW 34 Proceedings of the 34th Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop held in Konstanz in 2019, edited by Andreas Trotzke and George Walkden, University of Konstanz. Published at the University of Tromsø – The Arctic University of Norway. http://septent

follows a particular pattern of inflection (partially mirroring the noun declension), much like other Indo-European languages. One particularly noteworthy Gothic is an extinct East Germanic language that was spoken by the Goths. It is known primarily from the Codex Argenteus, a 6th-century copy of a 4th-century Bible translation, and is the only East Germanic language with a sizeable text corpus. It is the earliest Germanic language that is attested in any sizable texts, but it lacks any modern descendants. The oldest documents in Gothic date back t Gothic inherited the full set of Indo-European pronouns: personal pronouns (including reflexive pronouns for each of the three grammatical persons), possessive pronouns, both simple and compound demonstratives, relative pronouns, interrogatives and indefinite pronouns. Each follows a particular pattern of inflection (partially mirroring the noun declension), much like other Indo-European languages. One particularly noteworthy characteristic is the preservation of the dual number, referring to two people or things; the plural was used only for quantities greater than two. Thus, "the two of us" and "we" for numbers greater than two were expressed as wit and weis respectively. While Proto-Indo-European used the dual for all grammatical categories that took a number (as did Classical Greek and Sanskrit), most Old Germanic languages are unusual in that they preserved it only for pronouns. Gothic preserves an older system with dual marking on both pronouns and verbs (but not nouns or adjectives). The simple demonstrative pronoun sa (neuter: þata, feminine: so, from the Indo-European root *so, *seh2, *tod; cognate to the Greek article ὁ, ἡ, τό and the Latin istudcode: lat promoted to code: la ) can be used as an article, allowing constructions of the type definite article + weak adjective + noun. The interrogative pronouns begin with ƕ-, which derives from the Proto-Indo-European consonant *kʷ that was present at the beginni This is indicated by the shortening of long vowels [eː] and [oː] to [a] and the loss of short vowels [a] and [i] in unstressed final syllables. Just as in other Germanic languages, the free moving Proto-Indo-European accent was replaced with one fixed on the first syllable of simple words. Accents do not shift when words are inflected. In most compound words, the location of the stress depends on the type of compound: In compounds in which the second word is a noun, the accent is on the first syllable of the first word of the compound. In compounds in which the second word is a verb, the accent falls on the first syllable of the verbal component. Gothic adjectives follow noun declensions closely; they take same types of inflection. ==== Pronouns ==== Gothic inherited the full set of Indo-European pronouns: personal pronouns (including reflexive pronouns for each of the three grammatical persons), possessive pronouns, both simple and compound demonstratives, relative pronouns, interrogatives and indefinite pronouns. Each follows a particular pattern of inflection (partially mirroring the noun declension), much like other Indo-European languages. One particularly noteworthy characteristic is the preservation of the dual number, referring to two people or things; the plural was used only for quantities greater than two. Thus, "the two of us" and "we" for numbers greater than two were expressed as wit and weis respectively. While Proto-Indo-European used the dual for all grammatical categories that took a number (as did Classical Greek and Sanskrit), most Old Germanic languages are unusual in that they preserved it only for pronouns. Gothic preserves an older system with dual marking on both pronouns and verbs (but not nouns or adjectives). The simple demonstrative pronoun sa (neuter: þata, feminine: so, from the Indo-European root *so, *seh2, *tod; cognate to the Greek article ὁ, ἡ, τό and the Latin istudcode: lat promoted to code: la ) can be used as an article, allowing constructions of the type definite article + weak adjective + noun. The interrogative pronouns begin with ƕ-, which derives from the Proto-Indo-European consonant *kʷ that was present at the beginning of all interrogatives in proto-Indo-European, cognate with the wh- at the beginning of many The same etymology is present in the interrogatives of many other Indo-European languages: w- [v] in German, hv- in Danish, the Latin qu-code: lat promoted to code: la (which persists in modern Romance languages), the Greek τ- or π-, the Slavic and Indic k- as well as many others. ==== Verbs ==== The bulk of Gothic verbs follow the type of Indo-European conjugation called 'thematic' because they insert a vowel derived from the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European phonemes *e or *o between roots and inflexional suffixes. The Gothic word wáit, from the Proto-Indo-European *woid-h2e 'to see (pft.)', corresponds exactly to its Sanskrit cognate véda and in Greek to ϝοἶδα. Both etymologically should mean "I have seen" (in the perfect sense) but mean "I know" (in the preterite-present meaning). Latin follows the same rule with nōuīcode: lat promoted to code: la 'I have learned /I know'. The preterite-present verbs include áigan 'to possess' and kunnan 'to know' among others. === Syntax === ==== Word order ==== The word order of Gothic is fairly free as is typical of other inflected languages. 400) haitē 'am called', derived from Proto-Germanic *haitaną 'to call, command'. The morphological passive in North Germanic languages (Swedish gör 'does', görs 'is being done') originates from the Old Norse middle voice, which is an innovation not inherited from Indo-European. ==== Dual number ==== Unlike other Germanic languages, which retained dual numbering only in some pronoun forms, Gothic has dual forms both in pronouns and in verbs. Dual verb forms exist only in the first and second person and only in the active voice; in all other cases, the corresponding plural forms are used.