Rights statement: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/english-language-and-linguistics/article/abs/nouniness-of-attributive-adjectives-and-verbiness-of-predicative-adjectives-evidence-from-phonology/A2C7505E2EC59125151E4722CC0829A4 The final, definitive version of this article has been published in the Journal, English Language and Linguistics, 25, (2), pp 257-279 2021, ©2020 Cambridge University Press.
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Final published version
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<mark>Journal publication date</mark> | 30/06/2021 |
---|---|
<mark>Journal</mark> | English Language and Linguistics |
Issue number | 2 |
Volume | 25 |
Number of pages | 23 |
Pages (from-to) | 257-279 |
Publication Status | Published |
Early online date | 16/03/20 |
<mark>Original language</mark> | English |
This article investigates prototypically attributive versus predicative adjectives in English in terms of the phonological properties that have been associated especially with nouns versus verbs in a substantial body of psycholinguistic research (e.g. Kelly 1992) - often ignored in theoretical linguistic work on word classes. Inspired by Berg's (2000, 2009) 'cross-level harmony constraint', the hypothesis I test is that prototypically attributive adjectives not only align more with nouns than with verbs syntactically, semantically and pragmatically, but also phonologically - and likewise for prototypically predicative adjectives and verbs. I analyse the phonological structure of frequent adjectives from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), and show that the data do indeed support the hypothesis. Berg's 'cross-level harmony constraint' may thus apply not only to the entire word classes noun, verb and adjective, but also to these two adjectival subclasses. I discuss several theoretical issues that emerge. The facts are most readily accommodated in a usage-based model, such as Radical Construction Grammar (Croft 2001), where these adjectives are seen as forming two distinct but overlapping classes. Drawing also on recent research by Boyd & Goldberg (2011) and Hao (2015), I explore the possible nature and emergence of these classes in some detail.