Abstract for Alexandra Teodorescu's talk

A semantic constraint on adjective ordering
Alexandra Teodorescu (Austin/McGill)
April 11, 2006 (Tuesday)
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM; Room 7102, The CUNY Graduate Center

The phenomenon that attributive adjectives are frequently subject to ordering restrictions has been widely discussed. However, questions such as (i) what adjectives are ordered, (ii) how are they ordered, and (iii) why are they ordered the way they are, are still very much a matter of debate. In this talk I will focus on cases where adjective ordering restrictions do /not/ apply, thus addressing some of these issues indirectly. Specifically, I will argue for an analysis where the syntactic component imposes ordering restrictions only on semantically equivalent structures. It may not be that all such structures are subject to ordering constraints, but it is only these that /can/ be. Crucial evidence for this proposal comes the so-called non-definite superlative constructions. In the absence of an operator, adjectives like /short/ and /Italian/ are strictly ordered. However, when the -/est/ morpheme is present, the same two adjectives are no longer subject to ordering restrictions. This suggests that the free word order effect is not due to the lexical properties of the adjectives involved but rather to the presence of the degree morphology.