John Benjamins Publishing Company
Chapter 8. Blackjack!
Abstract
Adjectives in many Indo-European languages morphologically agree with the nouns they modify in gender, number and case (if the language’s nouns can differ in case). These agreeing items seem to undermine several otherwise broad generalizations about morphology, word order and phrasal stress. Mysteriously, agreement in Germanic languages is limited to pre-nominal attributes, while all adjectives agree in Romance and Slavic languages. This essay proposes to analyze adjectival agreement in terms of a “Derived Nominal Hypothesis,” which assigns agreeing adjectives a word-internal nominal structure whose head is the agreement suffix itself. Consequently, these “adjectives” are actually Nouns (by Lieber’s Right Hand Head Rule), and so qualify as unexceptional heads of NPs. This supports Abney’s controversial conjecture for pre-nominal attributive adjectives (that they are heads of NPs). The Derived Nominal Hypothesis additionally succeeds in making several traditional observations on the behavior of agreeing adjectives fully compatible with current explanatory grammatical theory. It also accounts for many previously puzzling morphological properties of agreement and its syntactic distribution in those languages on which the study primarily focuses, namely Dutch, German, Latin and Czech. To a lesser extent, the essay touches on English adjectival word order and on common properties of Spanish and Latin agreement.
Abstract
Adjectives in many Indo-European languages morphologically agree with the nouns they modify in gender, number and case (if the language’s nouns can differ in case). These agreeing items seem to undermine several otherwise broad generalizations about morphology, word order and phrasal stress. Mysteriously, agreement in Germanic languages is limited to pre-nominal attributes, while all adjectives agree in Romance and Slavic languages. This essay proposes to analyze adjectival agreement in terms of a “Derived Nominal Hypothesis,” which assigns agreeing adjectives a word-internal nominal structure whose head is the agreement suffix itself. Consequently, these “adjectives” are actually Nouns (by Lieber’s Right Hand Head Rule), and so qualify as unexceptional heads of NPs. This supports Abney’s controversial conjecture for pre-nominal attributive adjectives (that they are heads of NPs). The Derived Nominal Hypothesis additionally succeeds in making several traditional observations on the behavior of agreeing adjectives fully compatible with current explanatory grammatical theory. It also accounts for many previously puzzling morphological properties of agreement and its syntactic distribution in those languages on which the study primarily focuses, namely Dutch, German, Latin and Czech. To a lesser extent, the essay touches on English adjectival word order and on common properties of Spanish and Latin agreement.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Acknowledgments vii
- Contributors ix
- Introduction 1
- Chapter 1. Structure at the bottom 5
- Chapter 2. The absent, the silent, and the audible 19
- Chapter 3. Lexical change and the architecture of the Lexicon 41
- Chapter 4. Dylan Thomas’s meters 67
- Chapter 5. The metrical system of William Carlos Williams 87
- Chapter 6. Linearization preferences given “Free Word Order”; subject preferences given ergativity 115
- Chapter 7. On the fronting of non-contrastive topics in Germanic 143
- Chapter 8. Blackjack! 171
- Chapter 9. Connectivity and definiteness in an English equative construction 201
- Chapter 10. On certain distributional gaps of Spanish possessives 217
- Chapter 11. Variability in the case patterns of causative formation in Romance and its implications 237
- Index 269
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Acknowledgments vii
- Contributors ix
- Introduction 1
- Chapter 1. Structure at the bottom 5
- Chapter 2. The absent, the silent, and the audible 19
- Chapter 3. Lexical change and the architecture of the Lexicon 41
- Chapter 4. Dylan Thomas’s meters 67
- Chapter 5. The metrical system of William Carlos Williams 87
- Chapter 6. Linearization preferences given “Free Word Order”; subject preferences given ergativity 115
- Chapter 7. On the fronting of non-contrastive topics in Germanic 143
- Chapter 8. Blackjack! 171
- Chapter 9. Connectivity and definiteness in an English equative construction 201
- Chapter 10. On certain distributional gaps of Spanish possessives 217
- Chapter 11. Variability in the case patterns of causative formation in Romance and its implications 237
- Index 269
