Chapter 3. Denominal relational adjectives

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Chapter 3
Denominal relational adjectives

Published online: 20 November 2020

Article outline

1.Sketch of the analysis
2.Empirical properties of relational adjectives
- A.Adjacency to the modified noun
- B.Non-availability of the prenominal position
- C.Combination of two relational adjectives in the singular with one noun in the plural
- D.There must be a lexical difference between affixes for relational adjectives and those for qualifying adjectives
- E.However, it is frequent that the same affix produces both qualifying and relational adjectives
- F.And at least there are two affixes that only produce relational adjectives
- G.Relational adjectives express underspecified relations between two types of entity
- H.Not being anchored to a dimension, relational adjectives reject degree modification
- I.Relational adjectives also lack polar oppositions
- J.Relational adjectives express relations between kinds of entities
- K.Relational adjectives produce bracketing paradoxes
3.Analysis: Relational adjectives as incomplete prepositional phrases
- 3.1The internal syntactic structure of relational adjectives
- 3.2The spell out of the structure: Phrasal Spell Out and the Superset
4.Previous analyses of the internal structure of relational adjectives
5.The external syntax of relational adjectives
- 5.1Deriving the syntactic position of relational adjectives
- 5.2Bracketing paradoxes
- 5.3What licenses ‘Singular + Singular = Plural’?
Notes
Appendix