"Abhold, leid, gewillt"... Are they Adjectives? Building a Corpus for a German-Spanish Syntactic Dictionary of Adjectives

Abstract

In elaborating a dictionary of adjectives, whether it is monolingual or bilingual, the first step for the lexicographer is to define what adjectives are, which, to date, is a task yet to be resolved satisfactorily. German includes a number of words traditionally described as adjectives working exclusively in a predicative position, but some authors have challenged their status. This paper sets out to elucidate whether these words are actually limited to a predicative function, as described in dictionaries and grammars, and what their main equivalents in Spanish are, so as to decide whether to include them in a corpus aiming at the elaboration of a German-Spanish syntactic dictionary of adjectives.