Inflectionless adjectives in Bulgarian as a case of nominal predication
Ekaterina Georgieva
April 2022 

This paper deals with the so-called ‘inflectionless adjectives’ in Bulgarian. Several new empirical observations are made regarding the syntactic distribution, the restrictions on definiteness and the exclamatory flavour of the noun phrases in which these adjectives occur. The main proposal is that these lexical items are predicates of (nominal) small clauses and that the construction in question does not seem to be limited to these exceptional adjectives. It is argued that both the attributive type and the comparative type of nominal predication are attested in Bulgarian, on a par with English small clauses like ‘an idiot doctor’ and ‘an idiot of a man’. I outline a syntactic account of these two types of nominal predication, according to which the two types correspond to different structures. I also propose that the semantic and syntactic properties of inflectionless adjectives are best accounted for if we assume that they combine with a null noun.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/006606 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	To appear in Proceedings of FDSL 14
keywords:	inflectionless adjectives, adjectives, concord, nominal predication, small clause, null noun, definiteness, bulgarian, slavic, morphology, syntax
Downloaded:	55 times

 

[ edit this article | back to article list ]