Abstract
The subject matter of this paper is the external syntax of adjectival synthetic compounds in Polish (e.g. czasochłonny, ciepłolubny, opiniotwórczy, etc.) and English (life-giving, sleep-inducing, far-reaching, etc.). The primary objective of the study is to determine whether -ny/-czy/-ły compounds in Polish and adjectival -ing compounds in English, whose heads appear to be derived from verbs, are deverbal in the sense of Distributed Morphology; that is, whether their external syntax points to the presence of complex verbal structure in their syntactic representation. It is shown that adjectival synthetic compounds in Polish and English behave in a way typical of underived adjectives, being unrestricted in the predicative position and allowing degree modification with very; as such they are not deverbal in the morphosyntactic sense with their syntactic representation lacking the functional heads vP and VoiceP found in deverbal structures. The limited productivity of adjectival synthetic compounds further contributes to their non-eventive status.
Highlights
The licensing of argument structure by deverbal adjectives has been a widely studies topic by language researchers
The objective of the study is to determine whether the morphosyntactic properties of Polish and English adjectival synthetic compounds point to the presence of argument structure, the external argument, and how their morphosyntactic characteristics are manifested in their internal structure
The present study is couched within the Distributed Morphology approach, which posits that syntax is a single generative component responsible for the formation of both sentences and words
Summary
The licensing of argument structure by deverbal adjectives has been a widely studies topic by language researchers. For a distributed morphologist, it is not sufficient to claim that an adjective (or a noun) being based on what appears to be a verbal root is deverbal as DM takes into account the internal semantics of words. What this means in practice is that deverbal formations are those whose meanings are fully transparent: this is not the case with, for example, scratcher where the suffix -er is not employed to form an agentive nominal, which is the most common function of the suffix. The non-eventive external syntax of -tos participles means that, despite being morphologically complex, they are simple structurally
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