Schlüter, JuliaJuliaSchlüter0000-0003-3995-15862019-09-192017-01-022016https://fis.uni-bamberg.de/handle/uniba/41544This paper focuses on a class of English adjectives that are subject to important restrictions on their syntactic placement. While core members of the adjective class freely occur in predicative and postnominal as well as in attributive positions, the group of a-adjectives has been claimed to be virtually barred from attributive uses (cf. Biber & al. 1999: 508; Huddleston & Pullum 2002: 559). For some members of this group, their etymological origin as prepositional phrases goes some way towards explaining their limitation to predicative and postnominal uses (e.g. afloat, alive, aloof, asleep, awake and many more; cf. Bolinger 1967: 12; Markus 1997: 490). For those adjectives that derive from ancient participles formed with the Old English ge-prefix (e.g. aghast, afraid, ashamed) and for those originating in adjectives prefixed by ge- (e.g. alike, aware), no similar historical explanation is available. The literature on the so-called ‘predicative-only’ adjectives yields two fundamentally different approaches to explaining their distributional restrictions, one semantic and one phonological. On the semantic side, the temporary, transitory meaning of typical a-adjectives weighs against their occurrence in attributive position, which is more appropriate for characterizing or habitual meanings (cf. Bolinger 1952: 1133-1137; 1967: 3-4; Jacobsson 1996: 218). On the phonological side, their stress contour creates an obstacle to prenominal occurrence: since all disyllabic a-adjectives have final stress, and the majority of English nouns are initially stressed, their juxtaposition in attributive structures leads to a high potential for stress clashes, which in turn gives rise to substantial avoidance effects (cf. Bolinger 1965: 143; Minkova 1990: 327). In the most detailed study of a-adjectives published to date, Jacobsson (1996: 217) comes to the conclusion that the semantic effects outweigh the phonological ones. It is the aim of the present study to arrive at a detailed reassessment of the positional restrictions bearing on a-adjectives and of the explanatory potential of semantic and phonological factors, respectively. For this purpose, an extensive corpus is used, which consists of 40 years of British newspapers totalling almost one and a half billion words. On the basis of the corpus data, a-adjectives can be grouped according to their ability to occur in attributive position. The groups that emerge show only a minimal overlap with Jacobsson’s (1996: 218) division. In addition to this descriptive readjustment, a revision of the explanation favoured by Jacobsson suggests itself. It is argued that premodification plays a prominent role in licensing a-adjectives in attributive position since its semantic as well as rhythmic effects contribute to the acceptability of these structures. Contra Jacobsson (1996: 211), for some a-adjectives in particular, the avoidance of stress clashes, secured by premodification, turns out to be a more incontrovertible requirement than the semantic specification.engattributive use'predicative only' adjectivesbookparturn:nbn:de:bvb:473-opus4-485851