Adjectives

Adjectives are a nominal syntactic category that is distinct from but shows also overlap with nouns and verbs, and also with determiners and adverbs. Important questions that have been raised concern their universal availability, their emergence, their distinction from nouns and verbs, and their morphological derivation. Adjectives became a prominent topic of study after the popularization of the Determiner Phrase (DP) in the analysis of the noun phrase and the introduction of several other functional projections dominated by the DP. This led to the distinction between attributive and predicative adjectives within the noun phrase and to the investigation of the relation between position and interpretation within the noun phrase. With respect to their interpretation, their gradability and the semantic and syntactic impact of gradation has been the subject of many studies. Other important questions concern the establishment, the types, and the role of adjectival inflection or agreement and their possible role in the licensing of nominal ellipsis. Besides adjectival inflection, another typical characteristic distinguishing the adjective as a category in certain languages has been claimed to be the adjectival article. The study of the acquisition of aspects of the adjective has been used to support various theories on language acquisition.