restrictive vs nonrestrictive modification and evaluative predicates
Résumé
Evaluative adjectives have often been claimed to manifest a strong, an even exclusive, preference for the nonrestrictive reading. For those languages like French that allow poth the post and pre-head positions for at least a subset of their adjectives, a frequent observation reported in support of this claim is that evaluative adjectives are often 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 argument is that evaluatives do appear in postnominal 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 a modifier can be restrictive or non-restrictive in two different ways varying with the domain it operators on, and that being restrictive (resp non-restrictive) in one way only allows the modifier to appear in the post-head (resp pre-head) position. In Section (2), we discuss in detail the two uses of the notion of (non-) restrictivity used in the literature. Section (3) shows what is common to these two uses. Section (4) identifies the contexts in which evaluative adjectives can appear in post-nominal position and explains why, on the basis of the definitions of (non)restrictively built in Sections (2) and (3). The analysis proposed is compared with two previous accounts of the nonrestrictive bias of evaluative predicates.
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