The contrast in adjectives

It is now fairly well established that the position of an adjective correlates with its interpretation in a variety of diverse ways (Bolinger 1967; Sproat and Shih 1988; Valois 1991; Bernstein 1993; Cinque 1994; Laenzlinger 2000; Mcnally and Boleda 2004, among many others, and work in the typological tradition including Hetzron 1978 and Dixon 1982). One such contrast is reflected in the Bolinger examples in (1) and (2), in which the prenominal adjectives most naturally receive (something like) an individual-level interpretation and the postnominal ones (something like) a stage-level one (Larson 1998; Larson and Marušiˇc 2004; Larson 1999).

There are other clear distinctions in this domain, though. In (3a), for example, the most natural interpretation involves a person who is both religious and socially masochistic; in (3b), the most natural interpretation involves a person who is both social and religiously masochistic.

And of course there are a variety of semantically based ordering restrictions on adjectives – many of them discussed in other papers in this volume – including in English a requirement that color adjectives precede size adjectives (the big red balloon vs. ∗the red big balloon).

The corner of this larger picture that is of immediate interest here is reflected in (4a), which has both a restrictive and nonrestrictive interpretation, and in (4b), which has only the restrictive one.

A similar ambiguity is observed in this variation on the familiar incantation that appears at the end of acknowledgment footnotes, where the nonrestrictive reading is the most natural: All the inevitable errors are solely the author’s responsibility.

This effect is not always easy to demonstrate – in part because English adjectives don’t generally like to be postnominal – but with a sufficiently heavy AP it can also be perceived in judgments of pragmatic oddness:

The postnominal position in (6b) gives rise to the feeling that the speaker does not regard all war crimes as needless and reprehensible.

This effect is not limited to English, and is in fact perhaps more easily seen in Romance, where adjective position is not restricted quite so severely. The generalization, though, takes a slightly different form. While in English postnominal adjectives are unambiguously restrictive, in Spanish prenominal adjectives are unambiguously nonrestrictive:¹

Italian works the same way² :

1 The facts are actually interestingly more complicated – nonrestrictive postnominal readings are subject to further restrictions. The absence of de María in (7b) can force the restrictive reading, for example (Violeta Demonte, p.c.).

2 These paraphrases are Cinque’s.