Adjectives and adverbs: Syntax, semantics, and discourse (review)

This volume consists of an introduction by the editors and eleven articles, each of which addresses some intriguing puzzle about the syntax, semantics, or pragmatics of adjectives and adverbs. The collection as a whole deepens the reader's understanding of why adjectives and adverbs pose a special challenge to linguistic analysis.

Typically, adverbs and adjectives occur in sentences as nonarguments. They appear to be less syntactically restricted than other parts of the clause (at least in languages like English). For instance, they can occur in various positions in sentences. Yet, if several adjectives/adverbs occur together in a sentence, their relative order to one another is usually restricted. This can be captured in different ways: a syntax-based analysis will assume a comparatively rigid syntactic structure within the adjectival/adverbial parts of the sentence, whereas a semantics-based approach will attempt to derive facts about word order from the ontological nature of modified arguments (Cinque 1999 and Ernst 2002 represent these two opposing camps). Semantics-based approaches lead to a deeper problem at the syntax-semantics interface. The way that adjectives and adverbs are interpreted can differ, and sometimes differs dramatically, depending on their position. Differences may have to do with the lexical content (e.g. careful(ly) as a manner vs. an evaluation by the speaker), the arguments of the predicate (e.g. resultative vs. manner readings of elegantly), restrictive vs. nonrestrictive modification by adjectives, commentary vs. at-issue interpretations, to name a few. Such facts can be relegated to syntax ('brute homonymy' approach), to semantics, or to pragmatics, but any analysis will have to address questions that do not normally arise in the linguistic description of core sentence structure. Finally, the content that adverbs and adjectives contribute to the overall message of the sentence can range at any level between truth-conditional content and speaker attitude. Here, several articles explore formats like dialogue semantics, expressive content (Potts 2005) in contrast to focus semantic value (Rooth 1992), and common ground (Stalnaker 2002) to achieve a fuller analysis of commentary material in the sentence. The collection as a whole permits the reader to see how syntactic and semantic analyses of interrelated phenomena dovetail, or sometimes do not, allowing the reader to experience the challenges of the topic.

Two contributions explore the syntax of adjectives. PETER SVENONIUS, in 'The position of adjectives and other phrasal modifiers in the decomposition of DP', proposes a universal syntactic structure of DP, which, as far as adjective ordering is concerned, rests on the following classes: focused adjectives, idiomatic adjectives (= near compounding), count adjectives, and SORT adjectives (including gradable adjectives). Each of these can be multiply instantiated, and their relative order might in part be motivated semantically. RICHARD LARSON and HIROKO YAMAKIDO, in 'Ezafe and the deep position of nominal modifiers', propose that certain adjectives are in fact arguments of the determiner and receive abstract case. According to this view, the semantic combination of adjective and noun is steered by, somewhat surprisingly, the determiner in DP. The analysis is motivated by Modern Persian but extends to Modern Greek, Japanese, and English postposed adjectives like in everything interesting. The data in this article overlap with those discussed by Demonte and Morzycki, who both invoke different means to guide the semantic interpretation of postposed adjectives.

Violeta Demonte's 'Meaning-form correlations and adjective position in Spanish' offers an overview of position interpretation in Spanish. She distinguishes two semantic types (predicative/nonpredicative) of adjectives, which can be combined with a noun through three kinds of syntactic Merge operations. Taken together, these determine the readings for all adjective-noun combinations she observes in Spanish. Demonte's analysis rests on the assumption that semantics will be able to provide closely related but distinct predicative/nonpredicative readings for many adjectives.

Adam Zachary Wyner, in 'Towards flexible types with constraints for manner and factive adverbs', spells out the details of a similar assumption for...