The Syntax of Deverbal Compound Adjectives in English

This volume presents research into the syntax and semantics of English deverbal compound adjectives based on the passive and active participles, e.g. pencil-drawn, action-packed, risk-taking, time-consuming. The study, couched in the current Distributed Morphology framework, uses rich linguistic data to investigate the syntactic behaviour of English participial compounds, in particular their ability to occur in typically adjectival and verbal contexts. The main claim of this work is that the verbal syntactic layers are not universally projected in the internal structure of adjectival synthetic compounds, the most important consequence of which is that linguistic formations derived from lexical verbs, even in combination with their arguments, need not be deverbal in the morphosyntactic sense.

Sebastian Wasak is a research associate in the Institute of Linguistics at The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin. His main research interests include word formation in Distributed Morphology (in particular, argument structure in deverbal adjectives and nominalizations) as well as synthetic and nominal compounding in English.