Il sistema di valutazione

The first two N-movement analyses presented in section 2.3.2, namely Valois’s and Bernstein’s, propose an adjunction analysis, while Cinque (1994, 2010) assumes that adjectives are generated in the Specs of dedicated functional projections.

Bernstein (1993) provides several arguments against the dedicated functional projection (hereafter DFP) analysis. Firstly, she refers to proposals on the Ro-mance nominal phrase, which assume that arguments of the DP occupy Spec positions of XPs in the extended nominal projection, and can also undergo rais-ing to higher Specs (Picallo 1991, 1994; Valois 1991). For instance, Picallo (1994) claims that the possessive pronoun in Catalan is base generated in Spec,NP and that it raises cyclically to Spec,NumP in order to be identified. The presence of adjectives in intermediate Specs would, therefore, block such movement, but adjoined APs would not. In Cinque 2010, however, where adjectives are again merged in the specifiers of dedicated functional projections this does not pose a problem as there are AgrPs above each FP, where the noun can optionally move.

As a result, the fact that the Specs of the FPs are filled does not block movement.

An additional argument against the DFP analysis according to Bernstein

13This generalisation is not as simple as it sounds, as movement is still necessary in some cases in order to derive the right order. In chapter 5 I talk about the base generation analysis in more detail, and compare it to Cinque’s analysis.

(1993:40), is that it is too restrictive. In particular, Bernstein claims that the adjective order is not as fixed as Cinque’s analysis predicts. In chapter 3, however, it will be shown that in the instances where the order is violated, there is always an independent factor that accounts for the flexibility of the order. An example of such a factor is focus fronting. The adjunction hypothesis, on the other hand, allows free ordering and, as a result, the ordering restrictions observed cross-linguistically have to be accounted for by stipulating some semantic or processing motivation.

A second restriction of the DFP analysis is that it predicts that adjectives of the same semantic class will be barred from appearing in the same phrase, as there is only a single FP dedicated to each class. Bernstein (1993:40, fn. 31) provides the examples in (99) as counter-evidence of this prediction. In these examples, the underlined adjectives are taken to belong to the same semantic class.

(99) a. the nice big round ball b. the long narrow white shelf

However, these examples do not actually contradict Cinque’s analysis. Firstly, the two adjectives in (99a) belong to two separate classes; big is related to Size and round to Shape. That these are two distinct classes is also verified by the fact that they belong to different categories under set theory. This was discussed in section 2.2.3, where we saw that adjectives relating to size are traditionally taken to be subsective, while shape adjectives are intersective.

As for the two adjectives in (99b), long and narrow, these would indeed fall under the category of Size. Nevertheless, Scott (2002) argues that the Size class needs to be further decomposed as adjectives that belong to this class appear to exhibit ordering restrictions. For instance, tall tends to appear before thin (a tall thin girl vs. #a thin tall girl ). After presenting the relevant data, Scott concludes that there needs to be a core Size class, which consists of adjectives like big and small, but he also adds the classes of Length, Height, Width and Weight.

The universal order that Scott (2002:114) proposes, which includes several new classes, is presented below:

(100) determiner > ordinal number > cardinal number > subjec-tive comment > ?evidential > size > length > height >

speed > ?depth > width > weight > temperature > ?wet-ness > age > shape > color > nationality/origin > material

> compound element > np

If Scott is correct, then (99b) is no longer problematic for Cinque’s analysis, as long and narrow fall under distinct classes and are, consequently, generated in the Specs of separate FPs. That said, the DFP analysis does indeed block adjectives that belong to the same semantic category from appearing in the same phrase.

This, however, is the correct prediction, as two adjectives that belong to the same class will have to be coordinated when appearing inside the same phrase.

This becomes evident when we look at examples with two colour adjectives. If a ball is half white and half black, then describing it as the black white ball or the white black ball sounds odd, while the coordinated equivalents (the black and white ball or the white and black ball ) are acceptable.¹⁴ The colour example is, therefore, problematic for the adjunction analysis as there are no syntactic constraints barring two adjectives of the same semantic class from appearing together.

The problem for Scott, however, and also for anyone who attempts to deal with the issue of how many dedicated functional heads exist inside the DP, is that it is difficult to know how far down that road one can go. Even Scott himself acknowledges that by proposing new categories one runs into the risk of not knowing when to stop (Scott 2002:116, fn. 20). According to Cinque (1994:96) there appears to be a limit on the number of attributive adjectives within the same DP (no more than six or seven). This, Cinque claims, is an argument in favour of the DFP analysis; an adjunction analysis cannot account for this number restriction, while it automatically follows from Cinque’s analysis as there is a limited number of function projections in which adjectives are generated.

If the functional projections are limited to six or seven, then Scott’s (2002) decomposition of the semantic classes introduced by Cinque (1994) becomes re-dundant. As a consequence, Scott would have to account for the ordering restric-tions he discusses, by employing some non-syntactic constraints as the number of adjective classes in his account exceeds the presumed number of functional projections. This conclusion could, in turn, be damaging to the DFP analysis, since the main idea behind it is that the cross-linguistic ordering restrictions are

14Examples like a Greek Cypriot song, where two nationality adjectives appear together, should not be considered to be counterexamples, as the two adjectives possibly form a compound in this case. A language which uses compounding for adjectives that fall under the same semantic class is Greek. Some examples are aspro-mavro ‘white-black’, elino-kipriako ‘Greek-Cypriot’, makro-steno ‘long-narrow’, steno-makro long’, but not *steno-mavro ‘narrow-black’.

always the result of a universal syntactic hierarchy.

However, it could be argued that there is no need to decompose the core semantic classes introduced by Cinque. The idea would be that the dedicated functional projections are semantically related to some general basic class. For instance, the Size class would also include height and length adjectives, and so on. The relative order of the adjectives within each class might be the result of an independent factor, for instance, a frequency effect.

This claim could be supported by the fact that the different size-type adjec-tives that Scott (2002) introduces do not always have clearcut ordering restric-tions between them. For instance, while Scott argues that a length adjective must precede a height adjective, some native English speakers do not get a clear contrast between phrases such as a long tall table and a tall long table. They do, however, notice a contrast across other classes, for example, a nice big smile vs.

#a big nice smile, and a big square table vs. #a square big table. This could, therefore, suggest that adjectives which are semantically related, but which still denote different enough qualities of the noun, might be adjoined to the same functional projection, something that would account for the flexibility of their ordering.¹⁵ Making use of adjunction within each class, does not undermine the adjectives-in-Specs analysis as the semantically unrelated classes will still be generated in the specifiers of dedicated functional projections.

Another example that might support the idea that there is no need to assume further decomposition of the Size class comes from Greek. As was mentioned in footnote 14, in Greek it is possible to form compounds from two adjectives belonging to the same semantic class, but not from adjectives across distinct classes. The examples given were steno-makro ‘narrow-long’ (or makro-steno) and *steno-mavro ‘narrow-black’. If width and length adjectives belonged to two separate classes, then we would expect that compounding of these two adjectives would have been unacceptable.

In conclusion, while there seem to be arguments for and against both propos-als, it appears that the adjunction analysis causes more problems than it solves.

The main drawback of adjunction is not being able to satisfactorily justify the rigidity of the adjective order across languages. While semantic reasons could be stipulated to generate the right order, the DFP hypothesis presents a straight-forward way of accounting for it. As for the argument that the DFP analysis

15The fact that two colour or nationality adjectives are forbidden from appearing in the same phrase unless they are coordinated, could, therefore, be the result of a semantic restriction rather than a syntactic one, which was assumed to be the case earlier in the discussion.

is too restrictive, by allowing adjunction within each class the freedom of adjec-tives that belong to the same class is accounted for. Moreover, in chapter 3 it will be shown that the apparent freedom in the order is often the result of an independent factor.