Chapter 6

The morphosyntax of Italian ethnic adjectives

In this study, we address ethnic adjectives in Italian, challenging the dichotomy between ‘thematic’ and ‘classificatory’ ethnic adjectives recently posited by Alexiadou & Stavrou (2011). Drawing upon the frameworks of Manzini & Savoia (2011a), Manzini & Franco (2016), Franco & Manzini (2017b), Savoia et al. (2017), and Franco et al. (2020), we present a unified characterization of Italian ethnic adjectives. We propose that the derivational morphemes shaping these adjectives serve as a derivational counterpart of the genitive adposition “di” (of) (along with other types of obliques), sharing a common predicational core and signature with them. Furthermore, we suggest that the framework proposed for ethnic adjectives can be broadly extended to relational adjectives in general.