Inflection and Derivation: How Adjectives and Nouns Refer to Abstract Objects

Abstract

The study of nominalizations raises foundational questions about the relation between adjectives and nouns in natural language and the differences in their semantics. In this talk, we present a syntactic and compositional semantic analysis of a previously unanalyzed type of inflected adjective in Dutch and contrast it with the semantics of the corresponding uninflected forms and deadjectival nominalizations. We use a rather sparse ontology, but assign a special relational semantics to nominalized inflected adjectives. We then briefly compare our analysis of the inflected forms to that of lo-marked adjectives in Spanish (Villalba 2009) to shed light on reference to abstract objects in natural language more generally.