Predication in non-clausal domains: a configurational approach to Sanskrit bahuvrīhi compounds and their Italian equivalents

In the present thesis I offer a unified solution for the following two apparently unrelated puzzles: i. why is the internal order of Sanskrit bahuvrīhis with a nominal/ adjectival qualifier determined by the dependency holding between the bahuvrīhi’s external referent and one of the bahuvrīhi-members? ii. why can’t the adjective which realizes the complement-of-quality-internal qualifier in Italian be dropped or be of the non-predicative type? The unified solution becomes available when the syntactic and semantic relations involved in Sanskrit bahuvrīhis and in the Italian complement of quality are translated into configurational terms, and movement is intertwined with configurations (as in the theory of Dynamic Antisymmetry): the constraint on the internal order of Sanskrit bahuvrīhis and the constraint on the type of qualifier in the Italian complement of quality are both by-products of the filter on subextraction known as “Subjacency Condition”. More explicitly, the ill-formed internal orders of Sanskrit bahuvrīhis correspond to phrase markers where the filter on subextraction is violated; likewise, Italian complements of quality whose qualifier is dropped or is a non-predicative adjective correspond to phrase markers in which the filter on subextraction is violated.