Co-referential relations in adjectival compounds in attributive and predicative functions

Abstract

This article provides a detailed analysis of the formal-grammatical and semantic nature of adjectival compounds (compound adjectives), considering the functional-communicative and referential approaches. This research is relevant because it distinguishes between the concepts of syntactic synonymy and coreference. The latter is interpreted as the nominative-functional correspondence of syntactic units that denote the same extra-linguistic object or situation. In this case, the lexemes share a common root or identical lexical and phraseological composition. It has been established that the co-referential relationships between compound adjectives and positionally fixed word combinations and predicative constructions are underpinned by the potential nature of their generalised semantics, which is capable of unfolding into isofunctional variants of varying structure. The specific features of adjectival compounds with indefinite-quantitative and qualitative-evaluative components (malo-, bahato-, vysoko-, nizko-, syvo-, etc.) have been investigated. It has been demonstrated that such units are capable of correlating with: syntactically indivisible phrases in the instrumental case (e.g., ‘grey-browed’ // ‘with grey eyebrows’); prepositional-case constructions denoting quantity (e.g., ‘multi-storey’ // ‘with many storeys’); constructions with a generic qualitative modifier (e.g., a patrician of noble birth // a patrician of high birth); and subordinate attributive predicative clauses. Particular attention has been paid to the role of semasiological components (words with a weakened lexical meaning) in syntactic transformation processes. This includes the functioning of basic verbs such as 'to be' and 'to have' (particularly in their 'zero' form in the present tense), their negative forms ('not to be', 'not to have'), and synonymous verbs with more specific meanings such as 'to exist', 'to be located', 'to possess', 'to contain', 'to consist of', 'to manifest', 'to give', 'to weigh', and so on. It is demonstrated that these verbs ensure syntactic cohesion and can ‘collapse’ into a composite syntactic unit or be explicated upon the expansion of a subordinate clause. The study demonstrates that adjectival compounds exhibit varying degrees of coreference, ranging from complete coreference involving multiple forms, to partial coreference limited to predicative units only. These findings deepen our theoretical understanding of syntactic derivation and the contraction and expansion of utterances, as well as the semantic-syntactic structure of compound words.