스페인어 형용사의 위치와 의미에 대한 교육

A study of Spanish adjective position and meaning and its application to the Spanish teaching

This study investigates the position and the semantic meaning of Spanish adjectives. Spanish adjectives, contrary to English adjectives, appear pre and postnominally. And this difference of position has effects on semantic interpretation. Therefore many Korean students learning Spanish have difficulty in using prenominal and postnominal adjectives and understanding the semantic differences. The teaching of Spanish adjectives, however, lacks explanatory power concerning the word order and the adjectival construction. Regular qualitative adjectives can be used in both prenominal and postnominal positions. Relational adjectives, on the other hand, can be used exclusively in the post nominal position. Individual-level predicates can be used in pre and postnominal positions, and stage-level predicates obligatorily appear in the postnominal position. When the noun is modified by two adjectives, they obey the Spanish word order. In this paper, I show the structural relation that various adjectives establish with the noun. Further, I argue that adjectival predicates in Spanish exhibit a correlation between syntactic position and change of meaning, and thus it is necessary to consider their basic and distributional properties through the structural analysis in teaching and leaning Spanish.