Adjectives: Predicates and Attributes

You have been going along reading German so far without paying much attention to adjectives, except for their lexical value.

In English, that's all you need to know about adjectives, anyway: what the word means. You just put the adjective before the noun it modifies, or use it as a predicate adjective.

In German, adjectives fit into a much more complex system. As you might guess, an adjective has to "agree with" the noun it modifies, in gender, number, and case.

But the adjective must also fit into the pattern of the determiners for that noun.

You might want to think of this as the noun government: It reflects noun gender, number, and case, and also the whole structure of a noun phrase, including the use of articles, demonstratives, or possessives. This is why we have waited until now to study adjectives. It is very complicated compared to English.

As in English, German adjectives are used:

as predicates in conjunction with verbs like 'sein', 'werden', 'bleiben', etc. (das Buch ist gut)
as attributes directly preceding nouns (ein gutes Buch)

There is a big difference between predicate adjectives and the adjectives that function as attributes. Only the attributes are part of the "noun government" and reflect the complex of noun declension.

As in English, German adjectives can be placed between the article and the noun. Preceding the noun, the adjectives become part of the system that makes the case, number, gender of the noun identifiable. Therefore, in German adjectives used as attributes add an ending.

There are basically two sets of endings for adjectives. Why two? Well....

There is one set (the "weak endings") which are used when determiners give you enough information about the noun. The other set (the so-called "strong endings") is used whenever extra information is needed to indicate the case, gender, and number.

We are going to suppose that the pattern for using adjective endings is logical--even though it has many exceptions and oddities. The logic we present here is not founded on history or psychology. It is just a help for you to understand and remember the patterns of use.

Sometimes it helps to see everything systematically laid out, so you know what you need to memorize. Well, Mr. Ugo G. Klinger has laid it all out for you: Deklination von Adjektiven. Links to an external site.

We will begin, though, with the easiest part: how adverbs are formed from adjectives, and the form of the predicate adjective.

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