The Syntax of Adjectives

Abstract

A new analysis of adjectives, supported by comparative evidence. In The Syntax of Adjectives, Guglielmo Cinque offers cross-linguistic evidence that adjectives have two sources. Arguing against the standard view, and reconsidering his own earlier analysis, Cinque proposes that adjectives enter the nominal phase either as “adverbial” modifiers to the noun or as predicates of reduced relative clauses. Some of his evidence comes from a systematic comparison between Romance and Germanic languages. These two language families differ with respect to the canonical position taken by adjectives, which is prenominal in Germanic and both pre- and postnominal in Romance. Cinque shows that a simple N(oun)-raising analysis encounters a number of problems, the primary one of which is its inability to express a fundamental generalization governing the interpretation of pre- and postnominal adjectives in the two language families. Cinque argues that N-raising as such should be abandoned in favor of XP-raising—a conclusion also supported by evidence from other language families. After developing this framework for analyzing the syntax of adjectives, Cinque applies it to the syntax of English and Italian adjectives. An appendix offers a brief discussion of other languages that appear to distinguish overtly between the two sources of adjectives.

No N-raising out of NPs in Spanish: ellipsis as a diagnostic of head movement

“…(1) is adapted from Bosque and Picallo (1996), where a head movement analysis is proposed for deriving the final ordering of the DP. Here we abstract away from complexities in the ordering of adjectives in Romance and Germanic, also addressed in Bosque and Picallo, which Recent research has questioned the empirical foundation of these proposals by pointing out that the observed word order variation can, and in fact should, be explained in other ways (Alexiadou 2001b, Ticio 2003, Shlonsky 2004, Cinque 2010, and the references therein). Arguments against head movement in the DP come from various considerations.…”

A View of the CP/DP-(non)parallelism from the Cartographic Perspective

“…Following Cinque [4], Laenzlinger [10,11,24], and Scott [80], the simplified hierarchy can be established in (56) for event-denoting nouns and (57) for object-denoting nouns Laenzlinger [11] (p. 650). 56 Cinque provides a more fine-grained hierarchy with dual positions for direct/indirect adjectival modifiers [37] (see also Sproat and Shih [81,82], Larson [83]) and the possible position for the noun in Germanic and Romance. See (58) and Table 1.…”

“…8. Structure: (QP) > DP deixis > FocP > TopP/ModifP > DP det According to Laenzlinger [10,11] and Cinque [37] the focus projection hosts emphatic fronted adjectives in Romance. This is illustrated in (9a) for French.…”

“…An example of structural parallelism lies in the division of the clause and the noun phrase into three domains: (i) the Nachfeld (right periphery), which is the thematic domain; (ii) the Mittelfeld (midfield), which is the inflection, agreement, Case and modification domain and (iii) the Vorfeld (left periphery), which is the discourse-and operator-related domain. However, we will show following Giusti (2002Giusti ( , 2006, Payne (1993), Bruening (2009), Cinque (2011), Laenzlinger (2011, 2015 among others that the inner structure of the Vorfeld and of the Mittelfeld of the clause is not strictly parallel to that of the noun phrase. Although derivational parallelism also lies in the possible types of movement occurring in the CP and DP domains (short head/X-movement, simple XP-movement, remnant XP-movement and pied-piping XP-movement), we will see that there is non-parallelism in the application of these sorts of movement within the clause and the noun phrase.…”

“…[ [37,48]. Given the derivation in (22) the lower DP2 moves to the specifier of DP1 past the superlative projection.…”