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The Noun Phrase in English: Past and present
Edited by Alex Ho-Cheong Leung and Wim van der Wurff
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 246] 2018
► pp. 77–112

Chapter 4
The rich, the poor, the obvious

Arguing for an ellipsis analysis of “adjectives used as nouns”

 | Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
This paper deals with nominal constructions such as the rich, the poor, the impossible, i.e. noun phrases that have a more or less fixed form and meaning ([+human] or [+abstract]). The focus is on the question of headedness and internal structure – the paper presents new data and ideas against the view that the adjective undergoes a conversion/nominalisation process. Drawing on parallels with elliptical noun phrases, it is argued that the adjective in the noun phrases under consideration remains an adjective which modifies a silent noun. This receives further support from a contrastive perspective – a comparison with German demonstrates that restrictions on the form and function of the construction derive from the rather impoverished inflectional system in English, as argued by Olsen (1988). The analysis proposed here addresses hitherto unaccounted-for aspects such as the use of an overt head noun (lexical or one) and non-adjectival elements in prenominal position (quantifiers, determiners other than the definite article) in nounless noun phrases.
Keywords: nounless noun phrases, ellipsis in noun phrases, silent nouns, conversion of adjectives, English-German grammatical differences
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Properties of the Human and the Abstract Construction: A contrastive perspective
    • 2.1The constructions in English
    • 2.2The constructions in German
    • 2.3Adjectives or nouns?
  • 3.Parallels to noun ellipsis
    • 3.1Overlap in form and function
    • 3.2Apparent counterarguments
  • 4.Empty nouns and anaphora
    • 4.1Arguing for an empty noun analysis
    • 4.2Silent and overt empty nouns in English
    • 4.3Language-specific differences
    • 4.4Anaphora and antecedents
  • 5.Summary and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Corpora
  • References
Published online: 18 June 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.246.04gun
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Corpora
BNC: British National Corpus. <[URL]>
COCA: Corpus of Contemporary American English. <[URL]>
. <[URL]>
A St. Galler Tagblatt
B Berliner Zeitung
BRZ Braunschweiger Zeitung
DPA Deutsche Presse-Agentur
HAZ Hannoversche Allgemeine
HMP Hamburger Morgenpost
M Mannheimer Morgen
NON Niederösterreichische Nachrichten
NUZ Nürnberger Zeitung
RHZ Rhein-Zeitung
SOZ Die Südostschweiz
T die tageszeitung
WPD Wikipedia
Z Die Zeit
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