German A(djective)–N(oun)–N(oun) compounds exhibit unexpected internal inflection. The main purpose of this paper is to account for the interesting fact that the adjective in German A–N–N compounds shows several options to inflect for case. It can either agree with the first noun, with the second noun, or with neither of them. A production-task experiment confirms the existence of all three patterns. This is an important result since from a theoretical perspective, agreement of the adjective with the second noun is unexpected because it seems to violate standard locality conditons. Our claim is that the semantic relation in A–N–N compounds is always represented correctly. As a consequence, the different observed inflection strategies are not due to different structures (contra Lawrenz in Deutsch als Fremdsprache 32(1):39–42, 1995). We rather argue that the observed diversity is a consequence of the order of syntactic operations that apply: In German A–N–N compounds, adjectival inflection depends on (i) the order of the operations Agree and Insertion and on (ii) the interaction of these operations with the Strict Cycle Condition and the Minimal Link Condition.

中文翻译：

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解决德国 A–N–N 化合物中意外的案例一致性

德语 A(djective)–N(oun)–N(oun) 复合词表现出意想不到的内部变化。本文的主要目的是解释一个有趣的事实，即德语 A-N-N 复合词中的形容词显示了几种变化形式的选项。它可以与第一个名词一致，也可以与第二个名词一致，也可以不与这两个名词一致。生产任务实验证实了所有三种模式的存在。这是一个重要的结果，因为从理论角度来看，形容词与第二个名词的一致是出乎意料的，因为它似乎违反了标准的局部性条件。我们的主张是 A-N-N 复合词中的语义关系总是被正确表示。因此，观察到的不同的屈折策略并不是由于不同的结构（在 Deutsch als Fremdsprache 32(1):39–42, 1995 中与 Lawrenz 相反）。