Abstract
The subject matter of this paper is the external and internal syntax of adjectival compounds based on -ble adjectives in English (e.g. vaccine-preventable, machine-readable, drug-susceptible) and passive potential adjectives in Polish (e.g. łatwopalny ‘combustible’, lekkostrawny ‘lit. easily digestible, light’, szybkozmywalny ‘quickly-washable’), with special attention paid to whether the syntactic behaviour exhibited by -ble and -ny/-alny adjectives is also present in compounds headed by them. Drawing on analysis put forth by Oltra-Massuet (2013), the present research departs from Oltra-Massuet's account in that certain ble adjectives which show irregular morphology (e.g. visible, tolerable) are interpreted as high (eventive) -ble adjectives. It is shown that while synthetic -ble compounds in English inherit the syntactic features of their heads, passive potential adjectives in Polish often lose the ability to project the external argument upon being merged with a modifier to form a compound.
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© 2022 Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland
Articles in the same Issue
- Table of contents
- A dependent case approach to complex event nominals in standard Arabic
- Word-formation and reduplication in standard Arabic: A new distributed morphology approach
- Predicting foreign language skills based on first languages: The role of lexical distance and relative morphological complexity
- Formulaic language in oral academic discourse socialization of graduate students in a Northern Cyprus university
- ‘Leftover women’: A sociolinguistic study of gender bias in Chinese
- The syntax of plurals of collective and mass nouns: Views from Jordanian Arabic
- Attitudes of Nigerian expatriates towards accents of English
- Synthetic -BLE compounds VS. -BLE adjectives: Issues in the external and internal syntax
- English loan translations in Polish in the area of computers: Syntactic aspects
- Engagement in Chinese criminal judgments
Articles in the same Issue
- Table of contents
- A dependent case approach to complex event nominals in standard Arabic
- Word-formation and reduplication in standard Arabic: A new distributed morphology approach
- Predicting foreign language skills based on first languages: The role of lexical distance and relative morphological complexity
- Formulaic language in oral academic discourse socialization of graduate students in a Northern Cyprus university
- ‘Leftover women’: A sociolinguistic study of gender bias in Chinese
- The syntax of plurals of collective and mass nouns: Views from Jordanian Arabic
- Attitudes of Nigerian expatriates towards accents of English
- Synthetic -BLE compounds VS. -BLE adjectives: Issues in the external and internal syntax
- English loan translations in Polish in the area of computers: Syntactic aspects
- Engagement in Chinese criminal judgments