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Antonio Fbregas

The internal syntactic structure of relational adjectives

In this article we propose that relational adjectives are amenable to a configurational morphological analysis where form and meaning are isomorphic. We argue that relational adjectives are, in fact, nouns which contain in their internal syntactic structure a semantically defective matrix of features which is spelled out as an adjectival affix. This proposal allows us to explain many of the morphological, semantic and syntactic properties of relational adjectives, among them the existence of bracketing paradoxes, the iteration of suffixes or their combination with prefixes that denote groups of individuals, such as bi-, mono- or poly-.

Probus, Walter de Gruyter

Print ISSN: 0921-4771
Volume: 19, 04/2007
Pages: 1 - 36

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