Friday, April 24, 2026

Detail #376 Revisited: Quirky Adjectives

 In quirky adjectives I considered some quirky things adjectives can cause. Some new ideas that have occurred to me are:

  • Offset gender, number or definiteness marking on the noun
  • Specific adjectives that force plural marking on collective singular nouns
  • Adjectives that cause nouns to have special case marking in comparisons
  • Adjectives that force explicit plural marking (or explicit singular marking) on numerals.
    • In a language where numerals are followed by singulars, consider 'the_pl honorable_pl five_pl members of this committee', and for a language where they're normally followed by singulars, 'the_sg honorable_sg five_sg member of this committee'. For the case with forced plural marking, consider the case 'the_pl honorable_pl one_pl member_pl of this committee'.
  • Adjectives that change the scope of negation and quantifiers around them, while also having actual adjectival semantics. E.g. 'no student solved every ADJ task' - imagine the adjective here is something like 'damned', but also pulls along a change in scope such that it now means 'no student solved any task'.
  • Words that syntactically are adjectives, but semantically are voice operators, so that e.g. a certain adjective specifies that the noun in fact is the marker makes both marks 'this clause is passive' and the agent of the clause by its mere presence. This could also perhaps work with e.g. tense as adjectives instead, such that e.g. multiple contrasting subjects of different tense (or even objects) could coexist. This isn't tense of NPs, this is tense of VPs marked as an adjectival marker inside the NP.

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