Codeswitching and the syntactic status of adnominal adjectives

Abstract The recent syntactic literature contains three major proposals concerning the syntactic status of adnominal adjectives: 1. (1) that they are heads, 2. (2) that they are phrasal adjuncts, and 3. (3) that they do not form a uniform class. Given this lack of consensus, it is not surprising that the distribution of adnominal adjectives had remained an unsolved problem in the study of intrasentential codeswitching. In this paper, we propose a solution by exploiting the formal model of intrasentential codeswitching developed in Mahootian (1993), which is based on the null hypothesis that codeswitching sequences are not subject to structural constraints beyond the general principles of phrase structure that govern monolingual sequences. We first show that a blanket treatment of adnominal adjectives as heads is untenable, and then argue that the distribution of adnominal adjectives described in the codeswitching literature provides a new source of evidence in favor of the view that there are two distinct classes of adjectives. We review a number of alternative treatments proposed in the codeswitching literature and show that our analysis is preferable.