Enrique Mallen (Texas A&M University)

Attributive Adjective Configurations in Germanic and Romance.

The study of adjective position in Romance and Germanic languages has been the focus of attention of several research paradigms during the last decades. Topics have ranged from the classification of adjectives based on their co-occurrence restrictions to the position of nominal elements with respect to adjectives of different classes. See, for instance, Demonte (1999), Gili Gaya (1943), Fernández-Romírez (1951), Luján (1980a), Demonte (1982), Martin (1995) etc. for discussion of the relevant syntactic and interpretive properties involved. As these authors indicate, the unmarked surface position for adjectives in Romance is postnominal. When an adjective appears both pre- and postnominally, the position of the adjective disambiguates meaning. Adjectives preceding the noun are interpreted as attributive (Giorgi & Longobardi 1991), intensional (Kamp 1975), or subject oriented (Jackendoff 1972); while adjectives following the noun are predicative or objective. Attributive adjectives in Germanic are almost uniformly prenominal. Only a restricted class of adjectives optionally take a postnominal position. In these cases, a change in interpretation occurs: prenominally, the adjective conveys a sense of customariness; postnominally, a sense of temporariness. The distribution of a certain adjective also affects its acceptability in predicative contexts: an adjective that may appear postnominally may be interpreted predicatively; while an adjective that is restricted to prenominal position is generally banned from predicative contexts. See Bolinger (1967) for English and Luján (1980) for Spanish. In this paper, I propose a uniform analysis of adjectival modifiers. Adjectives occur in the highest and lowest nominal projection in the noun phrase. This initial configuration complies with the thematic and argumental requirements imposed by the noun. Subsequently, an operation of noun phrase-raising takes place. This operation displaces the entire noun phrase, adjoining it to an intermediate functional category, movement being triggered by the predicative features on the noun. The combination of an initial multiple-layer noun phrase plus noun phrase movement accounts for the puzzling contrasts in attributive adjective configurations in Romance and Germanic.