Adjectival Modification and Order Restrictions

Book excerpt: This monographs investigates into the influence of the individual-/stage-level distinction (IL/SL) on order restrictions of multiple prenominal adjectives (AORs). It rejects the restriction regularly postulated—across different research frameworks—that SL-adjectives are being realized farther from the head noun than IL-adjectives, relegating the alleged constraint to an epiphenomenon of more general principles. While formal-theoretic hypotheses on AORs are formulated and put to the test empirically via a large corpus as well as two rating studies, the book also addresses adjective classification, modification patterns, and the IL-SL-debate in general. The preferred prenominal positions of typical SL-adjectives are argued to follow from their nature as absolute-gradable adjectives as well as from the distinction between object- and kind-modification. The empirical studies corroborate these considerations. The book critically discusses and opposes several well-established hypotheses on AORs, sketches a flexible and parsimonious syntax of adjectival modification, and will be of interest to syntacticians and semanticists working on DP-structure, the IL-SL-debate, and adjectival modification