The Syntax Of Adjectives

other language families. --

Adjectives are comparatively less well studied than the lexical categories of nouns and verbs. The present volume brings together studies in the syntax and semantics of adjectives. Four of the contributions investigate the syntax of adjectives in a variety of languages (English, French, Mandarin Chinese, Modern Hebrew, Russian, Spanish, and Serbocroatian). The theoretical issues explored include: the syntax of attributive and predicative adjectives, the syntax of nominalized adjectives and the identification of adjectives as a distinct lexical category in Mandarin Chinese. A further four contributions examine different aspects in the semantics of adjectives in English, French, and Spanish, dealing with superlatives, comparatives, and aspect in adjectives. This volume will be of interest to researchers and students in syntax, formal semantics, and language typology.

A new analysis of adjectives, supported by comparative evidence. In The Syntax of Adjectives, Guglielmo Cinque offers cross-linguistic evidence that adjectives have two sources. Arguing against the standard view, and reconsidering his own earlier analysis, Cinque proposes that adjectives enter the nominal phase either as “adverbial” modifiers to the noun or as predicates of reduced relative clauses. Some of his evidence comes from a systematic comparison between Romance and Germanic languages. These two language families differ with respect to the canonical position taken by adjectives, which is prenominal in Germanic and both pre- and postnominal in Romance. Cinque shows that a simple N(oun)-raising analysis encounters a number of problems, the primary one of which is its inability to express a fundamental generalization governing the interpretation of pre- and postnominal adjectives in the two language families. Cinque argues that N-raising as such should be abandoned in favor of XP-raising—a conclusion also supported by evidence from other language families. After developing this framework for analyzing the syntax of adjectives, Cinque applies it to the syntax of English and Italian adjectives. An appendix offers a brief discussion of other languages that appear to distinguish overtly between the two sources of adjectives.

This book brings together research on the semantics and pragmatics of adjectives and adverbs. It integrates lexical and compositional semantics and provides a full account of the structural and interpretive properties of adjectives and adverbs. It will interest students in linguistics and philosophy at graduate level and above.

This book adopts a new approach to a major area of syntax - the way in which adjectives are bound together with other words in phrases or sentences.

This book is the first monograph which provides a comprehensive discussion of the syntactic behaviour of Old English (OE) adnominal adjectives. Drawing on the empirical data retrieved from the York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (Taylor, Warner, Pintzuk & Beths 2003), the author proposes an analysis of OE adjectives by means of a theoretical apparatus couched in the framework of Chomskyâ (TM)s generative grammar. The analysis incorporates the following properties of OE adjectives: â [ their inflectional patterning, i.e. whether adjectives take â oeweakâ and â oestrongâ inflectional endings â [ the so-called adjective stacking, i.e. whether adjectives can occur in uninterrupted strings â [ the surface placement with respect to their complements â [ the surface placement with respect to the nominal head The author observes that the differences between prenominal and postnominal adjectives go far beyond the superficial difference in their surface placement. She argues therefore that the two types of adjectives require two different theoretical treatments. The volume consists of five chapters. It is supplemented by four appendices and an extensive bibliography.

No detailed description available for "Where have All the Adjectives Gone?".

Intended for students at both postgraduate and undergraduate level this series aims to provide a broad view of the subject difficult to obtain exclusively from academic journals and monographs. Coverage of this series will be extended to all main aspects of linguistic study, and will include work on major language families, on English and on other important languages.