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NP-internal structure and the distribution of adjectives in Mə̀dʉ́mbὰ

  • Constantine Kouankem EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: February 22, 2021
Linguistics Vanguard
From the journal Linguistics Vanguard Volume 7 Issue 1

Abstract

This article discusses the structural and internal properties of adjectives in Mə̀dʉ́mbὰ, a Grassfield language spoken in the west region of Cameroon. It focuses on material inside the NP with a view towards establishing the structural positions of NP-internal constituents such as adjectives. I analyze adjectives and propose, following Scott, Gary-John. 1998. Stacked adjectival modification and the structure of nominal phrases. School of Oriental and African Studies Working Papers in Linguistics and Phonetics 8. 59–89, Scott, Gary-John. 2002. Stacked adjectival modification and the structure of nominal phrases. In Guglielmo Cinque (ed.), Functional structure in DP and IP: The cartography of syntactic structures, 91–120. New York: Oxford University Press that adjectives pattern within the DP just like adverbs pattern within the clause. In Mə̀dʉ́mbὰ, an adjective can be placed before the noun, after the noun or alternatively before and after the noun. Mə̀dʉ́mbὰ adjectives can further be distinguished as belonging to three classes: pure adjectives, verbal adjectives and nominal adjectives. In this paper I focus principally on the position in which attributive adjectives are generated inside the DP. However, issues relating to the internal structure of adjectives will also be mentioned. I show that Cinque, Guglielmo. 1994. On the evidence for partial N-movement in the Romance DP. In Guglielmo Cinque, Jan Koster, Jean-Yves Pollock, Luigi Rizzi & Raffaella Zanuttini (eds.), Paths towards universal grammar, 85–110. Georgetown: Georgetown University Press, Cinque, Guglielmo. 2003. The dual source of adjectives and XP-vs. N-raising in the Romance DP. Incontro annuale di dialettologia, Padua, 26, Cinque, Guglielmo. 2010. The syntax of adjectives: A comparative study. Linguistic Inquiry Monographs. Cambridge: MIT Press), and Laenzlinger, Christophe. 2005. French adjective ordering: Perspectives on DP-internal movement types. Lingua 115 views are both necessary to fully capture adjectival placement facts in Mə̀dʉ́mbὰ. Building on and refining the analysis given by these authors, I demonstrate that the type of mechanism involved in introducing adjectival modification correlates with the syntax of the adjective. On the proposal advanced here, depending on their syntactic distribution, adjectives are generated in specifier positions directly and NumP versus FP movement yields the surface structure.

Keywords: FP movement; functional projection; Mə̀dʉ́mbὰ; nominal properties; pure adjectives; verbal adjectives
Corresponding author: Constantine Kouankem, Bilingual Letters, Higher Teacher Training College Bertoua, University of Ngaoundéré, Bertoua, Cameroon, E-mail:

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Received: 2020-05-31
Accepted: 2020-11-05
Published Online: 2021-02-22

© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2020-0046
Keywords for this article
FP movement; functional projection; Mə̀dʉ́mbὰ; nominal properties; pure adjectives; verbal adjectives

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Editorial Note
  2. Editorial note
  3. Phonetics & Phonology
  4. Fast Track: fast (nearly) automatic formant-tracking using Praat
  5. Acoustic investigation of anticipatory vowel nasalization in a Caribbean and a non-Caribbean dialect of Spanish
  6. Evidence against a link between learning phonotactics and learning phonological alternations
  7. The extent and degree of utterance-final word lengthening in spontaneous speech from 10 languages
  8. Morphology & Syntax
  9. Brand names as multimodal constructions
  10. NP-internal structure and the distribution of adjectives in Mə̀dʉ́mbὰ
  11. A quantitative investigation of the ellipsis of English relativizers
  12. Positional dependency in Murrinhpatha: expanding the typology of non-canonical morphotactics
  13. Semantics & Pragmatics
  14. Multifactorial Information Management (MIM): summing up the emerging alternative to Information Structure
  15. Language Documentation & Typology
  16. Current trends in grammar writing
  17. Psycholinguistics & Neurolinguistics
  18. Experimental filler design influences error correction rates in a word restoration paradigm
  19. Phonological and morphological roles modulate the perception of consonant variants
  20. Language Acquisition and Language Learning
  21. Sounds like a dynamic system: a unifying approach to Language
  22. Sociolinguistics and Anthropological Linguistics
  23. Using hidden Markov models to find discrete targets in continuous sociophonetic data
  24. “It’s a Whole Vibe”: testing evaluations of grammatical and ungrammatical AAE on Twitter
  25. The sociolinguistics of /l/ in Manchester
  26. Computational & Corpus Linguistics
  27. An empirical study on the contribution of formal and semantic features to the grammatical gender of nouns
  28. A computational construction grammar approach to semantic frame extraction
  29. The “negative end” of change in grammar: terminology, concepts and causes
  30. In order that – a data-driven study of symptoms and causes of obsolescence
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  33. Iconicity ratings really do measure iconicity, and they open a new window onto the nature of language
  34. Repetition in Mandarin-speaking children’s dialogs: its distribution and structural dimensions
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