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The Positions of Adjectives in English

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The Positions of Adjectives in English The Positions of Adjectives in English The Positions of Adjectives in English P. H. MATTHEWS 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox26dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries. # Peter Matthews 2014 The moral rights of the author have been asserted. First Edition published in 2014 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2013956957 ISBN 978–0–19–968159–4 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, cr04yy In memory of Stephen Matthews 1937–2009 Contents Preface ix 1. Introduction 1 How far have uses diverged? 2 Are there other positions? 7 Prospectus 14 2. Which words are adjectives? 15 Adjectives as added to nouns 18 Conversion 25 3. Can one position be primary? 33 Adjectives as basically attributive 34 Adjectives in early generative grammar 36 Adjectives in underlying structures 40 Is there a conclusion? 44 4. How the syntax of adjectives has changed 49 Adjectives in Middle English 50 The attributive position in Modern English 53 Predication and attribution 59 5. Modifiers and determiners 67 How linguists have described determiners 70 Why divisions can be uncertain 78 Are determiners a part of speech? 84 6. Relations between premodifiers 87 Sequences and coordination 88 Combinations of premodifiers 93 Modifiers and submodifiers 100 7. Linear and layered dependency 105 Is there evidence for layering? 108 Linking within sequences 115 Links to a head 121 viii Contents 8. Adjectives in extended predicative positions 123 Predicative complements 124 Object complements or small clauses? 130 Subject complements 139 9. States and occurrences 143 Which adjectives take the progressive? 144 Copular clauses 151 10. The positions of modifiers 159 Rules and exceptions 160 Single adjectives as postmodifiers 167 11. Envoi 173 References 181 Index 187 Preface This study is dedicated to the memory of my brother, who after a working career in what was then the Inland Revenue, began a new life, in retirement, as a historian. He was elected to the Royal Historical Society in 2008, and is described by a co-author, in an article which came out after he died, as ‘an enthusiastic, inspiring, and multi- faceted scholar, who will be sorely missed’ (Medical History 54 (2010): 29). His death came after a year’s terminal illness, inseparable in my memory from the earliest botched attempt to get the subject matter of this book in order. It will appear in the calendar year in which, if all goes well, I will turn eighty. I am therefore getting old; and superannuated scholars have a tendency to live, if not in the past, in an intellectual world of their own, centred on ideas and preoccupations that may not entirely coincide with those of their successors. I have therefore been helped enormously by comments from others, especially in conversation with Rosanna Sornicola and Sylvia Adamson, both of whom read earlier drafts of some chapters; and from the reports of three very well chosen referees. It has been a great pleasure to work with John Davey, who stepped down this March after truly distinguished work as the linguistics editor for the Press. Cambridge June 2013 1 Introduction 1.1 The predicative and attributive positions. How far have uses diverged? 1.2 Adjectives not of a default type: attributive only vs. never attributive. 1.3 Adjectives limited to attribution in some meanings. 1.4 As more than exceptions? 1.5 The attributive position as one of greater differentiation. Are there other positions? 1.6 Adjectives with verbs other than be. 1.7 Extensions of the predicative position. 1.8 Attribution vs. postposition. 1.9 Postposition and predication. 1.10 The classification of adjectives by position. Prospectus 1.11 Topics to be addressed in chapters that follow. 1.1 The latest and best-informed account of adjectives, as a part of speech defined across languages, is by Dixon (2010: 62–108). He does not assume that every language has a category that can be so named. But English is one of many languages throughout the world which have a class of words whose grammar is clearly different from that of others, which can be identified as adjectives by, in particular, the ‘semantic tasks’ they can perform. One ‘major’ task, as Dixon puts it, is to ‘make a statement that something has a certain property’. Thus, in English, The chief is tall could state, of someone referred to by the chief, that they have a property of being tall. Another task, which is also ‘major’,is‘as a specification that helps identify the referent of the head noun’. Thus, in English, a phrase the tall chief could refer to someone identified as a chief who is, more specifically, tall. There are languages in which the category as Dixon sees it has one of these tasks only: the first certainly; also, perhaps, the second (2010: 71). Nor do adjectives always have the same wide range of meanings: in an extreme case (2010: 74), only a handful of units are so distinguished. In English however, as in other familiar European languages, words like tall are members of a large and open class whose tasks, or functions, typically include both those that Dixon illustrates. In their syntax and morphology, they differ from, in particular, both verbs and nouns. In grammars of English the distinction of functions has long been familiar. To ‘make a statement about something’ is to express what is traditionally a predication, and when adjectives are predicated they are in what is traditionally the ‘predicative 2 Introduction position’. As a verb has such a function in The chief spoke or The chief talked nonsense, so does either tall itself, or else a larger unit is tall,inThe chief is tall. The second function is performed by adjectives in another ‘position’, which is traditionally ‘attributive’.Inthe tall chief, the function of tall is as a unit attributive to, or as a modifier of, a noun. In both positions tall is the same part of speech. It can be characterized accordingly by two main functions, one predicative and one attribu- tive: one in the structure of a clause or sentence, and the other within the structure of phrases. We are talking, however, at a high level of abstraction. For it is well known that, while tall and many other adjectives can have both positions, there are others that traditionally at least have been assigned to the same part of speech, but whose uses are more limited. Main, for example, is attributive in the main town in the Highlands or their main argument for resigning: its task, as Dixon would put it, might be to help identify a town or argument in question. One would not say, however, This town is main,orTheir argument is main, not merely subsidiary. The uses of words in a-,in particular, are the opposite. The chief is afraid or She is awake are normal; but not the afraid chief or, for example, an awake baby. English is a language in which, in Dixon’s words, ‘just a few adjectives’ (2010: 71) are confined to one of his two functions. Are these, however, no more than excep- tions, or do they perhaps form part of a more general pattern? How far have uses diverged? 1.2 The straightforward answer is that of current reference grammars. For Quirk and his colleagues, an adjective like tall is a ‘central’ member of the category. It ‘can freely occur’ in both an attributive and a predicative function; and in their analysis an adjective is central only if, among other things, it does so (1985: 404). If not, it is one that they class as ‘peripheral’. Afraid, for example, is attributive only ‘in exceptional cases’ (1985: 403). It is called an adjective because, among other things, it is predica- tive in People are afraid. But afraid people is marked with ‘?*’ as a phrase ‘tending to unacceptability’ (see their explanation of symbols, x). The opposite case is repre- sented by utter. It is an adjective because one can say, for example, That is utter nonsense. But ?*That nonsense is utter, though not marked as ‘fully unacceptable’, again tends to be so. Afraid and utter, though for opposite reasons, are both adjectives; but each is a peripheral member of the category, not one that is central. The ‘default’ for an adjective, as Huddleston and Pullum put it, is ‘to be able to function’ in positions which include both the attributive and the predicative (2002: 553). Utter and main are instead one of a set that ‘do not normally occur’ except with the function tall has in the tall chief. They are therefore classed, as Quirk and his colleagues had classed them earlier, as ‘attributive only’.
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