Zur grammatiktheoretischen Einordnung von Nomen und Adjektiven

Pseudonominalisierte Adjektive an der Schnittstelle von Struktur und Interpretation

Abstract

This article is about the structure and interpretation of nominals based on pseudo-nominalized adjectives (= pnA) in German, such as jeder Fremde ‘every foreign (person)’ or das Gute im Menschen ‘the good (thing) in people’. The discussion is linked to the more general question of how nouns can be distinguished semantically from adjectives and verbs. First, I propose that only nouns introduce secondary conceptualizations of particulars. This is formalized by logical types that bring reference to particulars to the fore while demoting the nominal predicative content. Second, I exploit this semantic profile for a uniform and restrictive analysis of pnA in German. Accordingly, pnA contribute regular adjectival attributes to silent nouns that introduce either humans or abstract masses. This analysis accounts for the regular grammatical behavior of pnA, which is evident, for instance, from their combinatorics with determiners, from inflectional patterns, and from the observation that pnA always ascribe properties to independently given bearers. My proposal updates core aspects of the older analysis in Olsen (1988). Furthermore, it is shown that pnA in German are clearly at odds with non-uniform analyses of pnA as more recently proposed by McNally & de Swart (2015) for Dutch.