Die Flexion der Indefinita jemand und niemand

Abstract

Abstract This article investigates the inflection of the German indefinite pronouns jemand and niemand in the accusative and dative. The pronouns are used both with inflectional suffix (jemanden/jemandem, niemanden/niemandem) and without (jemand, niemand) and are thus an example of current variation in contemporary German. The grammars take an unusually liberal stance and describe both forms as correct, partially even with preference to the uninflected form. A corpus study which examines conceptually written data of the DeReKo (German reference corpus) and conceptually oral data of the DECOW16B (German web corpus), shows that over 90 % of occurrences are inflected. But almost 10 % of uninflected forms show that these formations are no arbitrary errors either. To find out what influences the presence or absence of the inflectional ending, a binary logistic regression model was calculated. The following factors proved to be significant influencing factors for inflection: the degree of formality (DeReKo vs. DECOW16B), the lexeme (jemand vs. niemand), the case (acc vs. dat), government by preposition vs. government by verb and the following nominalized adjective (jemand anderen). With regard to the different inflectional suffixes, the frequent use of -en in the dative stood out in particular. Although this form is classified as erroneous in all grammars, almost 30 % of the dative occurrences in informal DECOW16B data are formed in this way.