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Adjectives, Specificity and Genericity
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Dinu, Anca |
| Copyright Year | 2013 |
| Abstract | The present paper is devoted to a study of prenominal adjectives in Romanian aiming to prove that a group of prenominal adjectives, but not all of them, encode specificity. This claim is made against a more general syntactic view of the Romanian DP claiming that there are two phases in the DP, a lexical NP phase and a functional DP phase. This claim has been supported by different arguments such as linearization, the checking of definiteness, the assignment of the genitive case, the syntax of demonstratives, etc. As we have shown in earlier works, the syntax and interpretation in nominal adjectives is also an argument for distinguishing two arias, an area of NP adjectives and an area of DP adjectives. Romance languages are known to exhibit important correlations between the positions of adjectives and their interpretations. Researchers have claimed that there is a correlation between the following two phenomena: postnominal As would all be intersective, while prenominal As would all be nonintersective appositives. These generalizations are backed by contrast like: (1) a. marele om b. rau mare din Europa In fact, both generalizations are too strong, as recently emphasized by Morzycki (2009). There are postnominal appositive As, even if we ignore the situation of appositions marked by pauses. Appositive interpretations may be syntactically marked: an example is the ‘cel’ constructions in Romanian and its equivalents in other languages (2) and, more interestingly, there are As which only have appositive readings, since they express a subjective evaluation that has nothing to do with class intersection. An example at hand is the adjective ‘afurisit’ (damn), ‘fenomenal’ (phenomenal). (2) a. savantul cel genial b. un copil afurisit mi-a spart geamul c. un pianist fenomenal On the other hand, (and this is the focus of our paper) prenominal adjectives are not all appositive either. For instance, it is not possible to interpret as appositive intensional operators, like ‘former’ and ‘future’. With respect to languages like English, where all uncomplemented As are in principle prenominal, the claim has often been made that (even if we ignore the minute details of Cinquean hierarchies), prenominal As fall into two categories. Stavrou (????) notices that As which are closer to the head denote properties inherent in the head, while As which are placed to the further right of the DP are context bound, reflecting the speaker’s judgment on the referent of the DP (3). (3) a. a phenomenal former American president Reinterpreting this contrast for Romance languages which dispose of prenominal as well as postnominal As, it has more recently been proposed that prenominal As express speaker bound opinions about the referent, i.e. they are specific, while postnominal As express objective properties of the nominal head. Such a view has been developed in important recent studies, such as Damonte (2008, pp. 20): “In indefinite context, DPs with prenominal As have a specific reading. On the other hand, DPs with postnominal As are ambiguous between a specific and a non-specific interpretation.” Damonte comments on (32), remarking that the DP containing the specific adjective has wide scope. In (32 a), where the nominal with indefinite article and prenominal adjective is embedded under universal quantifier, we find the referential/quantifier ambiguity characteristic of indefinites. The DP is specific in the referential reading and it takes wide scope. In (32 b), which corresponds with the same sentence with the embedded nominal constructed with the postnominal adjective, the indefinite DP has only the expected narrow scope quantificational reading. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.old.unibuc.ro/depts/limbi/limbi_moderne/docs/2013/iun/25_17_37_10Adjectives_and_specificty.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
