The basic inflectional structure of adjectives: degree and agreement

• Autores: Alberto Pastor
• Localización: The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Morphology / coord. por Antonio Fábregas Alfaro, Víctor Acedo Matellán, Grant Amstrong, María Cristina Cuervo, Isabel Pujol Payet, 2021, ISBN 978-0-429-31819-1, págs. 152-162
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • This chapter explores the inflectional properties of adjectives. In Spanish, nouns and pronouns have inherent gender features, while other types of words, including adjectives, acquire gender features through agreement. From an inflectional standpoint, adjectives in Spanish are classified in three groups. Group A includes a large number of adjectives that give rise to four form paradigms. Group B includes a smaller but still plentiful number of adjectives called one-ending adjectives. Group C includes adjectives ending in -s, such as isosceles and gratis. Some linguists, such as Baker, suggest that agreement takes place in syntax, where the gender feature in the noun is copied in the adjective, while the nature of the suffix exclusively belongs to syntax. There is a relatively small set of affixes in Spanish that attach to adjectival roots to convey meaning related to the notion of degree, that is, the extent to which the property denoted by the adjective is applied to an individual.