Complex negative adjectives in Japanese: The relation between syntactic and morphological constructions

Abstract

Japanese has a fairly large set of complex adjectives formed by combining a noun with the adjective nai ‘null, empty’. The complex negative adjectives have the remarkable property that they allow nominative case marking to appear inside them optionally. We argue that these complex negative adjectives can be classified into three classes, and that the differences in their syntactic behaviour can be accounted for by positing three distinct morphosyntactic configurations (ranging from a fully phrasal structure to a complex word involving morphological compounding). Some, though not all, complex negative adjectives with case marking show a behaviour which suggests that they constitute single lexical units, while at the same time their components are susceptible to syntactic operations that normally do not apply to the internal structure of words. The data on the Japanese complex adjectives illustrate that adjectives formed via quasi-noun incorporation do not constitute words in a strict morphological sense, in that the entire complexes behave as lexical units, while their components remain visible syntactically.