Investigating cross - linguistic constraints on adjectival and adverbial

Combinatorial constraints are commonly assumed in linguistics to be either based on the grammatical system of a language or to be idiosyncratic constraints on the combinatorial properties of individual lexical items and not extensible in any systematic way to larger subsets of the vocabulary. Thus, the required complements of verbs are an example of a constraint of the former type, while the latter type of constraint is instantiated by lexical collocations which are commonly assumed to be individual and idiosyncratic co-selections of lexical items and are generally treated as a usage phenomenon. There are, however, subsets of the lexicon that display striking combinatorial constraints or, rather, combinatorial requirements, over and above singular lexical combinatorial preferences which are not modelled by the grammatical rules of the language. Such constraints can be shown to hold across larger subsets of the lexicon but are neither explicable as co-selection preferences of individual lexical items nor as constraints imposed by the grammatical rules of a language. Such constraints are found to govern, for instance premodification requirements of a subset of attributive adjectival past participle (APP) noun combinations. It has thus been observed that for reasons yet to specify, the following noun phrases – comprised of an adjectival element plus head noun – are felt to be unacceptable unless further qualified by an appropriate premodifier: