partnerformen

Partnerformen is a term used in linguistics and language pedagogy to denote the inflected forms a word takes when it is paired with a grammatical partner in a sentence. These forms are conditioned by the relationship between the word and its partner, such as agreement with gender, number, case, or person. The concept helps describe how the form of one word changes to align with another word in the same phrase or clause.

Scope and usage: The idea of partnerformen is applied across morphology and syntax. In many languages, elements within a phrase must agree with their syntactic partner, and the chosen partner form determines the appropriate variant of the involved word. Partnerformen are particularly relevant when analyzing concord patterns, subcategorization frames, and the generation of word forms in dictionaries and corpora. They are also used in language teaching to illustrate how form changes are triggered by the surrounding grammatical context.

Examples: In German, the form of adjectives and determiners often depends on the case, gender, and number of the noun they accompany, illustrating partner concord within a noun phrase (for example, different endings after definite versus indefinite articles). In verb conjugation, the verb ending changes with the subject pronoun, showing a partnership between the verb form and the subject. In languages with extensive agreement systems, such as Finnish or Turkish, many elements in a noun phrase or clause reflect partner concord.

In computational linguistics, partnerformen assist in annotation, parsing, and morpho-syntactic analysis, supporting more accurate language understanding and translation. The term is not always used uniformly; some grammars prefer terms like concord or agreement, but partnerformen emphasizes the relational pairing of forms between words.