Relational adjectives and prepositional phrases: the missing link

Abstract

In Catalan, relational adjectives (RAs) appear proportionally more often than qualitative adjectives (QAs) within prepositional phrases. This study explores the reason behind this difference by connecting it to RAs being often used to create expressions that denote complex concepts (e.g., relacions internacionals). The hypothesis that RAs are often part of expressions in which a PP modifies a noun to create a complexer concept (e.g., comitè de relacions internacionals) is tested through the statistical analysis of corpus data. The results falsify this hypothesis, and the difference in the distribution of RAs and QAs is still unexplained.