5 - The Morpho-syntactic Analysis of Relational Adjectives

Summary

A morpho-syntactic analysis of relational adjectives is provided in chapter 5 where I bring evidence for the denominal nature of relational adjectives (cf. Fábregas 2007 and Alexiadou & Stavrou to appear). I argue that the underlying nominal structure of relational adjectives is minimal on a par with Borer’s default structure that is underspecified for the mass-count distinction. Specifically, relational adjectives syntactically correspond to bare plurals/mass nouns in Romance but with a reduced structure. That is, in the absence of plural morphology and atomic reading, the NumberP is not realized in the structure of relational adjectives. Thus, as a default, all relational adjectives are interpreted as mass/underspecified nouns, but like bare nouns in Romance, they can be either arguments or modifiers. However, due to the different syntactic behaviour of Th- and Cl-adjectives, this chapter shows that they are amenable to different morpho-syntactic structures, i.e., Th-adjectives correspond to bare nouns arguments that are DPs in Romance while Cl-adjectives correspond to bare nouns which act as restrictive modifiers