Attribution im DaF-Übungsgrammatiken

This paper gives a survey over the most important attributive constructions in German: phrases based on adjectives (der amerikanische Präsident), participles (der gefeierte Präsident), nouns (Amerikas Präsident), prepositions (der Präsident aus Amerika), adverbs (der Mann links), conjunctions (der Präsident als Gegner), infinitives (die Angst zu versagen) or subordinate clauses (der Präsident, der aus Amerika kommt) and the possibilities of their combination in complex noun phrases. The aim is to investigate how these constructions are dealt with in didactic grammars of German as a foreign language. On the basis of a corpus of 28 grammars for beginners and advanced learners it is shown that they restrict explanations mostly to formal issues, neglecting semantic and pragmatic aspects such as inherent polysemy, style level, usage frequency and textual functions.