Linking morphs, stress and meaning in Dutch complex caritive adjectives

Dutch morphologically complex caritive adjectives ending in loos ‘-less’ present three explananda. [i] Where there is a choice between a variant including a linking morph (‘lm’) to the immediate left of loos and one lacking a lm, this choice is usually not random: in alternating pairs, the lm-less forms tend to have a literal interpretation while the forms with a lm frequently show a certain degree of semantic specialisation. [ii] Nominalisation of loos forms with heid ‘-ness, -hood’ can shift main stress to loos, particularly when a lm precedes loos. [iii] For loos+heid forms with variable stress, stress on loos can give rise to an interpretation pertaining to events/situations rather than to individuals. This paper accounts for all three properties, built upon an analysis of the morphosyntax of caritive loos according to which the presence of a lm requires a syntactic derivation involving a complex predication structure while the structure of loos forms without lm is ambiguous in principle between a syntactically complex one and an alternative involving compounding.