Between nouns and adjectives: A constructional view

Tungus proprietives, regularly derived from nouns by affixation, demonstrate a mixed behaviour. As adnominal modifiers, they have the full syntactic and morphological distribution of an adjective. Yet, the base noun retains some nominal properties: it can head its own syntactic phrase, control agreement on its modifier, trigger various anaphoric processes, pluralize, and take derivational affixes. These forms present a problem for the traditional view of syntactic categories, as they have the morphosyntactic properties of more than one part of speech. They are also important for the syntax/morphology interface, because the word structure and the phrase structure do not match: although the base noun selects modifiers as if it were an independent phrasal head, it is not an independent word in morphology. The paper shows that syntactic affixation analyses cannot adequately capture the Tungus data. Instead, I propose a constructional analysis based on the idea that relationships among classes of words are expressed in the lexicon by means of cross-cutting hierarchical types, where more specific types inherit information from more general types. The idiosyncratic behaviour of proprietives is lexically specified by the cross-classification of head values. Categorial information is inherited from adjectives and determines the external distribution of the phrase. At the same time, proprietives inherit the underlying nounʹs semantics (referentiality) and selectional properties. This analysis raises further questions about the nature of the traditional syntactic labels such as nouns or adjectives, namely, whether we are dealing with a new category type in each case of mixed categories.