Bucharest Working Papers in Linguistics (Jan 2010)
On the morpho-syntactic properties of relational adjectives in romanian and spanish
Abstract
This paper analyzes the morpho-syntactic structure of a subclass of Relational adjectives, Th(ematic) adjectives within the framework of Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz 1993). Building on Bosque and Picallo’s (1996) classification of Relational adjectives, I show that Thematic adjectives differ from Classificatory adjectives in their ability to absorb thematic roles and to occur in the predicative position. I explain this difference on the basis of different internal morpho-syntactic structures. More explicitly, Th-adjectives are analysed as Genitive DPs with an empty D on a par with de Genitive phrases in Romance. In the absence of de last resort insertion, Th-adjectives check the Genitive case only nP internally, as a full Gen DP which is in long distance Agree with AgrP. This analysis has the merit of explaining the ungrammaticality of Th-adjectives with complex event nominals as they cannot check the telic aspect of complex event nominals in SpecGenP, outside nP (cf. Cornilescu 2001).
