On the morning of March 10, 2018, Professor Phoevos Panagiotidis, a theoretic linguist from University of Cyprus, delivered a lecture “Do Adjectives Exist?” to the students and teachers of Zhejiang University. With Professor Cheng Gong, dean of School of International Studies as the host, this lecture attracted the students and teachers from School of International Studies and from School of Humanities, as well as the scholars on theoretic linguistics of different universities in Hangzhou.
Firstly, Professor Panagiotidis claimed that, lexical category is related to meaning. For instance, generic feature [N] stands for kinds and generic feature [V] for sub-events, while adjectives lack unified meaning and properties are not specific paraphrases of adjectives. Professor Panagiotidis also gave a detailed discussion on Russian and Spanish adjectives, and proposed that there’s no generic feature [A].
After that, Professor Panagiotidis said that an adjective is born out of the merging of roots and generic features [N] and [M], which exhibits the characteristics of adjectives, for instance, adjectives sometimes show the features of verbs (e.g. modified only by adverbs), and sometimes nouns (e.g. consistency). In the end, Professor Panagiotidis discussed the functional categories of adjectives, i.e. degree.
Finally, students and teachers present discussed several questions with Prof. Panagiotidis and analyzed Chinese adjectives in detail. With warm applause, this lecture came to a success. Containing minimalist program and distributed morphology, Professor Panagiotidis’s analytical method inspired students and teachers a lot.
(Written by Li Difei and Hu Yehao)
School of International Studies
