Adnominal adjectives in Old English

Abstract

Even though adnominal adjectives in Old English are distributionally versatile in that they may precede, follow or flank the noun they modify, their positioning is not random but follows from systematic interpretive contrasts between pre- and postnominal adjectives, such as ‘attribution vs predication’, ‘individual-level vs stage-level reading’ and ‘restrictive vs non-restrictive modification’. These contrasts are largely independent of adjectival inflection (pace Fischer 2000, 2001, 2006). The placement of adnominal adjectives in Old English is investigated in relation to recent comparative and theoretical studies on word order and word order variation (see Cinque 2007; Larson & Marušič 2004).

Three Types of Old English Adjectival Postposition: A Corpus-Based Construction Grammar Approach

“…The presence of an optional prenominal adjective, as in (3), has no bearing on the reading of the postnominal one, for which the above interpretive properties are said to hold. As observed by Ringe and Taylor (2014:455), in line with Haumann’s (2010) argumentation, the postnominal modifier is still “a (secondary) predicate adjective, generated in post-nominal position.” Conversely, for cases such as (2), Haumann (2003) gives a deletion-based account, explaining that the second adjective is actually pre-posed in relation to some elided semantic material. In other words, the underlying structure of (2) would be along the lines of hefige synne & myccle synne (such an analysis is largely consistent with Sielanko 1994 and Pysz 2009).…”

“…In sum, Haumann (2003, 2010) sees (1) and (3) as instances of true postposition, while in (2) the adjective is “falsely” postposed.…”

The lexical semantics of adjectives: more than just scales

“…There is substantial syntactic work in this area. In addition to work cited in section 4.1, this includes Crisma (1993), Alexiadou (2001), Bouchard (2002), Larson & Marušič (2004), Teodorescu (2006), Valois (2007), Vander Klok (2009), Aljović (2010), Centeno-Pulido (2010), and Kim (to appear), and historically-oriented work including Fischer (2006) and Haumann (2010). Semantic or semantically-oriented work that takes adjective-position observations as a starting point includes Truswell (2004Truswell ( , 2005, Champollion (2006), Katz (2007), and Morzycki (2008) The presence of the additional morpheme de is required to approximate the effect of the direct modification attempted in (164b).…”

The position of negative adjectives in Aelfric’s Catholic Homilies I .

“…Different authors (Fischer, 2000(Fischer, , 2001Haumann, 2010;Pysz, 2009) have observed that among others, a combination of the adjective's inflection type and its attributive or predicative use is a factor in whether the modifying element in question is preposed or postposed.…”