Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1984, Page 81

Af lýsingarorðsviðurlögum
79
SUMMARY
The purpose of this paper is to determine the status of appositive adjectives in sentences
like (1)—(3):
(1) Hann kom ungur til ísafjarðar
‘He came young to ísafjörður (i.e., when he was young)’
(2) Ég mætti Sveini drukknum
‘I met Sveinn drunk (i.e., Sveinn being drunk)’
(3) Hann bað fyrir Sveini sjúkum
‘He prayed for Sveinn ill (i.e., Sveinn being ill)’
These adjectives always agree with the noun they refer to (the subject in (1), object
íit (2) and object of preposition in (3)) in gender, number and case. The question
is, then: Do they originate as a part of the NP, and are then moved to the right;
or are they independent constituents of the S, VP and PP in Deep Structure?
The author argues that the first possibility is the correct one, and the second must
be abandoned. His main arguments are that such adjectives sometimes surface inside
the NP, as in (4)a:
(4) a Blindfullur strákurinn kom heim
‘Dead-drunk the boy came home’
b Strákurinn kom blindfullur heim
‘The boy came dead-drunk home’
Note that Icelandic has a V/2 constraint, so that (4)a cannot possibly'be derived from
(4)b, because then we would have to assume movement into the subject NP. Thus,
we must either derive (4)b from (4)a or assume a double origin for the adjective. The
author argues that the second possibility is not satisfying. He points out that if the
adjectives originated as immediate constituents of VP (and PP), we would have to
mention them as optional in the subcategorization frames of verbs (and prepositions);
but we would also have to show somehow that they are dependent on the object(s);
i.e., if the verb has no object, no adjective can occur. This can be seen with verbs
like borða, which takes an optional object; its subcategorization frame would have to
be [yp_____(NP) (AP)], suggesting that both the object and adjective are optional and
independent of each other; but this is wrong, as (5) shows:
(5) a Stefán borðaði matinn heitan
‘Stephen ate the food hot’
b Stefán borðaði
c Stefán borðaði matinn
d *Stefán borðaði heitan
In the last part of the paper, the appositive adjectives are compared to predicative
adjectives which are often quite similar on the surface, as the following examples show:
(6) a Strákurinn var blindfullur
‘The boy was dead-drunk’