La posición de los adjetivos adverbiales de modo en español; Estudio empírico y propuesta de análisis

Abstract

In Spanish, modal adjectives are generally presented as a class of units which, when used inside a noun phrase, is usually placed before the noun, albeit with ill-defined exceptions that allow them to be used after the noun. This corpus-based study aims to explore and better define the conditions that allow adjectives to be used postnominally, by semantically categorising a substantial quantity of nouns that in our chosen corpus most often combine with our set of five modal adjectives, and analysing the resulting readings. It shows that a syntactic analysis along the lines of Cinque (2010) can account for the main facts, but that it has to be enriched with semantic considerations from Bouchard (2002) in order to explain a small set of cases where some special readings emerge in postnominal position; we propose an NP movement internal to the direct modifier area for such cases.