Nouns as Adjectives and Adjectives as Nouns

Many languages have morphological devices to turn a noun into an adjective. Often this morphology is genuinely derivational in that it adds a semantic predicate such as ‘havingN’ (proprietive), ‘lacking-N’ (caritive’), ‘similar-to-N’ (similitudinal) and so on. In other cases the denominal adjective expresses some vaguely defined notion of possession as in Russian Ivan-ovo (detstvo) ‘Ivan’s (childhood)’, or is purely relational as in prepositional phrase (cf. the synonymous preposition phrase). In some languages and in some constructions the resulting adjective retains some of the noun-related properties of its base. For example, the base can be modified by an attribute as though it were still a syntactically represented noun (as in the English proprietive [short sleev]ed shirt), giving rise to what we call ‘syntagmatic category mixing’. We contrast classes of syntactic and lexical approaches to such constructions. On syntactic approaches the derivational affix takes scope over a syntactic phrase because the affix itself is introduced in the syntax. We argue that there are cases which cannot be handled in this manner, because the affix lacks crucial syntactic properties we would otherwise expect, such as taking wide scope over coordinated hosts, and because the syntactic approach cannot account for some of the syntactic properties of the derived modifier. For these cases we argue for a lexical approach based on the idea that the morphological, syntactic and semantic dimensions of a lexical representation are in principle independent and can be fractionated. We then define lexical type hierarchies on the basis of these fractionated lexical entries. This permits us to express the idea that a denominal adjective can have the external syntax of an adjective, for instance, agreeing with its head noun, while retaining the internal syntax of a noun, for instance, by still taking attributive modifiers of its own. We identify six principal types of denominal modifiers defined in terms of whether they exhibit category mixing and if so what kind. These are canonical derivation, canonical transposition (change of morphosyntactic category but no additional semantic content – relational adjectives in Russian and many other languages), mixed derivation (with syntagmatic mixing – proprietive adjectives in Tungusic), mixed transposition (transposition with syntagmatic mixing – possessive adjectives in Upper Sorbian, Chukchi possessive and relational adjectives), mixed inherent inflection (semantically contentful inflection with syntagmatic mixing – Selkup similitudinal forms), and mixed contextual inflection (Suffixaufnahme based on genitive case forms – Daghestanian/Cushitic). We show how each type represents a different fractionation of the lexical entry of the derived modifier.