Relational adjectives as properties of kinds

This paper provides an intersective analysis of so-called RELATIONAL adjectives such as Catalan tècnic ('technical') as in El Martí és arquitecte tècnic ('Martí is a technical architect'). As relational adjectives exhibit a subsective entailment pattern, they have previously been analysed as predicate modifiers. We discuss a number of syntactic and semantic Catalan phenomena that show that, instead, they behave like prototypical intersective adjectives in many respects.

To account for both the entailment facts and the other phenomena we discuss, we present a proposal inspired in Larson's analysis of event-related adjectives, namely, that relational adjectives denote properties of kinds. Thus, our analysis represents a further step in the project of simplifying and unifying the semantics of adjectives.