Journal article
Adjectives without syntactic categories
- Abstract:
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Elbourne has proposed that future research should investigate the possibility of eliminating syntactic categories from linguistic theory and letting their functions be taken over by independently motivated semantic categories such as semantic types (‘A program for eliminating syntactic categories’, 2024, Linguistic Inquiry). The current article applies this research programme to the case of adjectives. It argues that adjectives should be conceived of as functions from noun denotations to noun denotations (a unique type). Adjectives in predicative position are dealt with by giving a suitable denotation to the copula. Various arguments against this analysis of adjectives are reviewed and dismissed.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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- Files:
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 1.3MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1007/s11049-026-09703-w
Authors
- Funder identifier:
- https://ror.org/012mzw131
- Grant:
- MRF-2023-126
- Publisher:
- Springer
- Journal:
- Natural Language and Linguistic Theory More from this journal
- Volume:
- 44
- Issue:
- 1
- Article number:
- 17
- Publication date:
- 2026-03-12
- Acceptance date:
- 2026-02-23
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1573-0859
- ISSN:
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0167-806X
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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2381260
- Local pid:
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pubs:2381260
- Deposit date:
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2026-02-24
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Paul Elbourne
- Copyright date:
- 2026
- Rights statement:
- Copyright © 2026, The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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