The source of eventive implications of mental property adjectives and nouns in Polish

Abstract

Abstract In Generative Linguistics of the past 40 years an ever increasing stress was put on the intricacies of the information load contributed by morpho-syntactic structure above the level of the root. Roots, seen as naked roots, entities without grammatical categories and arguments to be introduced into morpho-syntactic representations of clauses, contain basic encyclopaedic and phonological information. This paper seeks to show that the information coded by roots has to be more extensive; Roots representing Mental Property meanings in Polish have to apportion eventive arguments to explain diversities in the production of morpho-syntactic structures. To capture some interesting facts about the complementation of Mental Property adjectives in Polish and eventive implications of their cognate nominals, we have to resort to the representation of roots as entities responsible for apportioning arguments. Otherwise, our model would lack descriptive adequacy and it would make wrong predictions about Mental Property morpho-syntax of Polish. Extensive material of Polish Mental Property adjectival and nominal forms shows that eventiveness of some Mental Property adjectives and nominals is not a property of morpho-syntactic structures building such forms, but rather an idiosyncratic property of individual roots with Mental Property meanings. These findings may suggest that Mental Property adjectives and nominals in other languages may require a re-analyses which would take under consideration a possible non-structural, but lexical source of their eventiveness.