Relational adjectives in English and Japanese and the RA vs. PP debate

Abstract

Akiko Nagano and Masaharu Shimada’s paper (Relational Adjectives (RA) in English and Japanese and the RA vs. PP debate) proposes that the distribution of so-called relational adjectives can be fruitfully captured by analyzing them as word-forms for direct modification. This type of adjectives is prevalent in English but totally absent in Japanese. They show that this cross-linguistic difference stems from the difference of the ways these languages choose to spell out the adjunct-introducing P; and the choice depends on the morphological properties of canonical adjectives in each language.