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Please Note: This is a new edition of a previously announced text.
This book is the first monograph which provides a comprehensive discussion
of the syntactic behaviour of Old English (OE) adnominal adjectives.
Drawing on the empirical data retrieved from the York-Toronto-Helsinki
Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (Taylor, Warner, Pintzuk & Beths 2003),
the author proposes an analysis of OE adjectives by means of a theoretical
apparatus couched in the framework of Chomsky’s generative grammar. The
analysis incorporates the following properties of OE adjectives:
* their inflectional patterning, i.e. whether adjectives take “weak” and
“strong” inflectional endings
* the so-called "adjective stacking", i.e. whether adjectives can occur in
uninterrupted strings
* the surface placement with respect to their complements
* the surface placement with respect to the nominal head
The author observes that the differences between prenominal and postnominal
adjectives go far beyond the superficial difference in their surface
placement. She argues therefore that the two types of adjectives require
two different theoretical treatments.
The volume consists of five chapters. It is supplemented by four appendices
and an extensive bibliography.
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