Decomposing (non)-restrictivity. Evaluative modifiers in post-head positions
Résumé
Evaluative adjectives have often been claimed to manifest a strong, and even exclusive, preference for the nonrestrictive reading ('the nonrestrictive bias of evaluative adjectives hypothesis'). A frequent observation reported in favour of this claim is that in languages like French, evaluative adjectives are sometimes odd in post-nominal position. The argument relies on what has been called the complementarity hypothesis, namely the hypothesis that pre-head modifiers receive a nonrestrictive interpretation in Romance, while post-head modifiers receive a restrictive interpretation. An immediate problem for this view is that evaluative adjectives can regularly be found in post-head positions in corpora. One of the goals of this paper is to reconcile these data with the nonrestrictive bias and the complementarity hypotheses. The idea pursued is that the terms 'restrictive' and 'nonrestrictive' cover two different but related properties, and that satisfying one of them only allows the modifier to appear in the post-head position. In Section (2), we discuss in detail the two definitions of (non-) restrictivity used in the literature. Section (3) shows how they relate to each other. Section (4) addresses the case where modifiers can appear in post-nominal position if they convey a causal relation only. Section (5) discusses two previous accounts of the nonrestrictive bias of evaluative predicates, identifies the contexts in which evaluative adjectives can appear in post-nominal position and explains why, on the basis of the definitions of (non)restrictivity built in Section (2).
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