Relational deverbal adjectives: grammatical behavior and semantic interpretation

Abstract

This paper focuses on the study and the morphosyntactic analysis of a set of deverbal adjectives formed with the Spanish suffixes -dor, -ivo and -orio, which behave semantic and syntactically as relational adjectives, despite having a verbal base (proyecto investigador, texto narrativo, movimiento migratorio). And this fact implies a mismatch between the deverbal form and the denominal interpretation. From different lexico-syntactic tests, we show that these deverbal adjectives are syntactically and semantically relational and this interpretation is built from the relationship that the verbal base establishes with the modified noun. With this proposal, we offer a single valid explanation for the three suffixes, which also allows us to account for the different interpretations that the same adjective can present: active, dispositional, and/or relational.