Speakers: Irina Morozova & Sjef Barbiers (LUCL)
Title: Why does water have a blue colour? Modification of Nouns and the Possession of Properties
When: Thu 17 April, 16:15 – 17:30
Where: Lipsius 2.23
Zoom: link / Meeting ID: 633 9946 0316 / Passcode: AgNKj$2d
There are at least three ways in Dutch to say that a car is green:
(1)
a. | een | groen-e | auto | |||
a | green-com | car | ||||
b. | een | groen-e | kleur | auto | ||
a | green-com | colour | car | |||
c. | een | auto | van | (een) | groen-e | kleur |
a | car | of | a | green-com | colour |
Shape and size adjectives also have the paradigm in (1), material adjectives do not (*een houten materiaal tafel ‘a wooden material table’). Exactly the same pattern holds for Russian. We argue against treating elements like kleur ‘colour’ in (1b) as the counterpart of a silent noun in (1a) (Kayne 2005) and propose an analysis in which (1b) is not derivationally related to (1a), but is derived from (1c) instead. We argue that in this case the relation between an adjective and a noun is mediated by a dimension classifier (DimCL), realised as kleur ‘colour’ in (1b,c). The nominal nature of DimCl leads to establishing a possessive relation between the noun and the DimCl, which is realised as the preposition van ‘of’ in Dutch (1c) or as genitive case in the Russian equivalent of (1c). As opposed to this, material adjectives (e.g., hout-en ‘wood-en’) do not involve possession, hence the patterns in (1b) and (1c) are impossible. Surprisingly, however, the pattern in (1b) also does not hold when the modifier targets a mass noun as in blauwe (*kleur) water ‘blue water’. We take this as a key observation and build our analysis on this.