Sentence (In)completeness of Adjectival Predicates: From a Feature Geometry Perspective

Previous analyses on the sentence (in)completeness of adjectival predicates fail to predict the occurrence of the markers cross-linguistically. On one hand, without the completeness markers that are supposed to appear, the sentences are felicitous, e.g. Russian. On the other hand, even with the presence of the completeness markers, the sentences cannot be completed, e.g. Mandarin. Under the framework of Feature Geometry, this paper argues that copulas, tense and inflection are treated as the results of checking active features. Rather, the cause of (in)completeness effects is generally attributed to the unexplainable features uANCHORING in AP. Besides, the linguistic parameters involved are set due to various ways of feature checking, which readily captures the cross-linguistic phenomena.