The nature of prenominal and pronominal adjectives

Abstract

The objective of this article is to present some of the contributions and limitations of the head movement hypothesis – which today has been very criticized by the literature – to the studies related to Brazilian Portuguese adjectives. The authors who assume such hypothesis claim that adjectives are generated prenominaly and that the movement of the name on the adjective explains the unmarked superficial order (positioned after the name, in DP). However, there are two different ways of analyzing the nature of adjectives that have been highlighted in the literature: in one side, several authors, represented in this article by Crisma (1990, 1993, 1996), defend that adjectives enter in DPs as specifiers of specific functional projections and, thus they are always XPs; on the other side, authors such as Bernstein (1993), for example, claim that adjectives can be auxiliars or adjuncts, that is, they can be heads or XPs. This divergence points to which problems a new hypothesis should face.