19.3896, Qs: Prenominal Adjectives with Complements

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LINGUIST List: Vol-19-3896. Thu Dec 18 2008. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 19.3896, Qs: Prenominal Adjectives with Complements

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1)
Date: 17-Dec-2008
From: Ina Schlafke < ina.schlafke at hotmail.com >
Subject: Prenominal Adjectives with Complements

 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2008 09:49:59
From: Ina Schlafke [ina.schlafke at hotmail.com]
Subject: Prenominal Adjectives with Complements

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Dear List members,

I am a student at the University of Wuppertal (North-Rhine Westphalia)
studying English. 

I am currently working on the distribution of adnominal adjectives within
the DP from a cross-linguistic point of view, thus I do not only deal with
English and German, but with many Romance and Balkan languages as well as
with Japanese. From what I have found so far in the literature, it seems
that there is a restriction on prenominal adjectives in some languages in
that they do not take prepositional complements:

* The proud of his son father. (English)

*un orgulloso de su  fanilia nino (Spanish)
   a   proud       of  his family boy

*un fier     de son fils home (French)
   a   proud  of  his  son man

Il    suoi  fedeli    (*alla causa)   sostenitori (Italian)
the their  faithful (to the cause)  supporters

However, other languages allow for prenominal adjectives to take
complements in prenominal position, e.g. German, Greek, and the Balkan
languages Albanian, Romanian and Bulgarian:

i     [periphani ja to   jot  tis] mitera	(Greek)
the proud            for the son her mother

die [auf ihren Sohn stolze] Mutter (German)
the on   her    son    proud  mother 

mnogo vernijat na zena si   muz (Bulgarian)
very      true-the to wife  his man
'the man very true to his wife'

I have already read many papers on Japanese adjectives but I could not find
any information on whether prenominal adjectives in Japanese can take a
complement or not. I would be grateful if you could answer my urgent
question and provide me with some data on that matter or point me towards
related papers and/or grammars that contain relevant data.

Thank you very much in advance.
Best regards, Ina. 

Linguistic Field(s): Syntax






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