Relational adjectives between syntax and morphology

A relational adjective (RA) is an adjective that does not express a property, but rather a relation to a concept designated by a noun. It is a controversial issue whether RA+N combinations are compounds or syntactic phrases. If we adopt a definition of compound that takes the semantics as an important component, RA+N combinations should be analysed as compounds. If RA+N and N+N are both compounding, we might expect that languages that have both choose names for the corresponding concepts independently of each other, so that an RA+N in one language is randomly connected to the name for the same concept selected in another language. I tested this hypothesis by analysing German and Italian translations of Levi's (1978) list of 383 compounds illustrating her Recoverably Deletable Predicates (RDPs) and nominalization types. The analysis shows that there is a strong cross-linguistic correlation in the use of RA+N. This raises the question of how to explain the correlation. I argue that it cannot be explained by a translation bias or a semantic bias, but that it provides evidence for how the choice of a name in the naming process is influenced by a speaker's mental lexicon and how speech communities relate to such choices by individual speakers. Keywords: relational adjective, compounding, translation, naming