The rich internal structure of gradable adjectives
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| Year of publication | 2025 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
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| Citation | |
| Description | The chapter provides evidence from Czech for the existence of at least three functional heads in a gradable adjective (Vanden Wyngaerd et al., 2020). The heads are (i) a dimension dim (such as speed), (ii) a direction dir (distinguishing antonymous adjectives such as fast vs. slow), and (iii) a standard of comparison, abbreviated as point. Evidence for this rich internal structure comes from the morphology of positive-degree adjectives, which can be morphologically complex, showing either the su?x n or k. These morphemes interact di?erently with the diminutive morpheme ouč, with n preceding the diminutive, and k following it. This indicates that n and k occupy two di?erent positions. When we consider the position for the root in addition, we have three positions for the adjective in total. Based on the distribution of the adjectival su?xes n and k in the comparative, we furthermore distinguish six di?erent classes of adjectives. Using a nanosyntactic approach (Starke, 2018), we argue that this complex distribution can be accounted for by assuming a decomposition of the comparative into three di?erent heads, the idea that roots vary in size, and the existence of lexical items with complex left branches (Blix, 2022). |
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