Remarks on Denominal -Ed Adjectives

31st Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation (PACLIC 31), pages 196–205 Cebu City, Philippines, November 16-18, 2017 Copyright c⃝2017 Tomokazu Takehisa Remarks on Denominal -Ed Adjectives Tomokazu Takehisa Niigata University of Pharmacy and Applied Life Sciences 265-1 Higashijima, Akiha-ku, Niigata 956-8603, Japan takehisa@nupals.ac.jp Abstract This paper discusses denominal adjectives derived by affixation of -ed in English in light of recent advances in linguistic theory and makes the following three claims. First, unlike recent proposals arguing against their denominal status, the paper defends the widely held view that these adjectives are derived from nominals and goes on to argue that the nominal bases involved are structurally reduced: nP. Second, the paper argues that the suffix -ed in denominal adjectives shows no contextual allomorphy, which is a natural consequence that follows from the workings of the mechanism of exponent insertion in Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz, 1993). Third, the meaning associated with denominal -ed adjectives stems from the suffix’s denotation requiring a relation, which effectively restricts base nominals to relational nouns, derived or underived. It is also argued that the suffix is crucially different from possessive determiners in English (e.g., ’s) in that, while the former imposes type shifting on non-relational nouns, the latter undergo type shifting to accommodate them. 1. Introduction Denominal adjectives derived by the adjectivizing suffix -ed, as in (1) below, are quite common in English and seem to have received the attention they deserve from grammarians and linguists. 1,2 1 Since so many cases of denominal -ed adjectives can be analyzed as verb-based as well (e.g., armed, knobbed, etc.), (1) a. blue-eyed b. bearded c. red-roofed d. black-jacketed The syntactic and semantic properties of these adjectives are intuitively clear; they are adjectives derived from suffixation of -ed to the nominal base N, either a nominal compound or a noun phrase, and they have the meaning related to possession such as ‘possessing N’ or ‘provided with N’, etc. The aim of this paper is to discuss denominal - ed adjectives in light of recent advances in linguistic theory and make the following claims about their structure, morphology and semantics. Specifically, on the fundamental assumption in the framework of Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz, 1993; Marantz, 1997, 2001) that there is no component dedicated to word formation, this paper defends the view that the -ed adjectives in question are denominal and argues that bases for - ed are reduced nominal structures, nP. It is shown that facts pertaining to number marking and interpretation support the nP-based analysis of denominal -ed adjectives. Incidentally, an analysis of the singular and plural forms of foreign nouns in English is offered along the way. much care is taken to present unambiguously denominal ones, i.e., ones which have no verbal counterparts or with prenominal modifiers. 2 See, among many others, Jespersen (1942), Hirtle (1970), Hudson (1975), Ljung (1976), Gram-Andersen (1992), Bauer and Huddleston (2002) and the references cited therein. See also Miller (2006:175ff.) for discussion of the Latinate counterpart -(a)te/-ated. 196 Second, we …

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