Reconciling generativist and functionalist approaches on adjectival position in Spanish

Abstract

Adjectival position in Spanish has been approached from two different and seemingly incompatible frameworks. On the one hand, Generativism accounts for adjectival position in terms of nominal movement (N-movement; cf. Cinque 1994, Crisma 1993, among others) and a surface order of adjectives based on their meaning (cf. Jackendoff 1972, Demonte 1999, among others.) On the other, Functionalist studies tackle this issue from the point of view of the influence of phonology (cf. File-Muriel 2006), semantic interpretation by speakers of the nouns adjectives accompany (cf. García-Bayonas) or informational structure (cf. Truswell 2003). This dissertation shows how these two frameworks can be considered to be complementary to one another, rather than being in opposition. Generativist and Functionalist approaches do not account however for post-syntactic phenomena such as meaning shift of postnominal adjectives that may be a result of grammaticalisation (cf. Bybee 2003). The two corpora also provide insight on the differences between language registers (spoken vs. written) and the impact of processing constraints of both registers on adjectival position in Spanish. Lastly, this dissertation adopts the NP-movement model proposed by Laenzlinger (2003) as an alternative to N-movement to map adjectives structurally and also to explain grammaticality judgment differences between Spanish and Italian.