Explaining the licensing of some adjectives in two attributive positions in Italian

ABSTRACT

The canonical position of the adjectives in Romance languages is post-nominal. However, it is observed a triparted distribution: although the majority of the romance adjectives is exclusively post-nominal, a very few adjectives can be only pre-nominal, and a relatively numerous group of adjectives can come after and also before the nucleus, with a change in meaning. Despite those distributional patterns, for the cartography approach there are only two syntactic sources for adjectives: a reduced relative (always post-nominal, leading to extensional interpretation) and functional projections, which include all pre-nominal adjectives and some post-nominal adjectives, responsible for the intensional interpretation. We propose that those adjectives that are licensed in Italian both before and after the nominal head are in a functional projection, DegP, and are implicit comparatives. The difference in interpretation (intensional and extensional) is a byproduct of the distinct domains from which the comparison parameter comes from, and not determined by the syntax. Neither the distribution nor the interpretation of adjectives in Romance languages can be explained solely based on the syntactic source. We defend the need to resort to semantics, adopting a degree semantics. All flexible adjectives (licensed in both the canonical and non-canonical positions) in a corpus of Italian were identified as gradable adjectives by independent tests.

Keywords:
The position of attributive adjectives in Italian; Syntax-semantics interface; The grammar of gradable adjectives in Romance languages