Root-derived passive potential adjectives in English

Abstract

Research into event and argument structure within Distributed Morphology has been centred on the assumption that the vP head is present in the structure of only those lexically deverbal words that behave eventively in terms of their external syntax (that is, they can license modifiers that describe the event of the underlying verb). The vP layer has been claimed to perform two main roles, namely serving as the locus of event implications and categorizing the structure syntactically as a verb. This paper, using evidence from root-derived -ble adjectives in English (e.g. applicable, perceptible, visible), argues that these two functions are fulfilled by two different functional heads. Specifically, it is shown that root-derived -ble adjectives can undergo event-related modification and thus be derived by a suffix that selects for an eventive functional head. Their structure nevertheless does not include the cyclic vP projection, present only in -ble adjectives derived from verbs as well as truncated roots (e.g. operable, tolerable, calculable).