The syntactic properties of Spanish defective approximative adjective ‘escaso’

Spanish adjective ‘escaso’ is used as a modifier of numeral quantifiers, as in ‘Hay escasas veinte personas en la clase’ and ‘Hay una escasa veintena de personas en la clase’. This adjective does not denote any scarcity of the entity designated by the noun, but rather indicates that the quantity expressed by the group formed by the quantifier and the noun is barely reached. In the above two examples, the adjective ‘escaso’ may precede or follow numeral quantifiers, but the distribution of ‘escaso’ in the latter example highly depends on the derivational configuration of the collective numeral noun ‘veintena’ which has an approximative numerical interpretation according to the parametric approach of Kayne(2005). By following and elaborating on Kayne(2005)’s insight, we intend to offer a novel syntactic approach that explains the adjective ‘escaso’ as a defective approximative operator and provide corresponding evidences that show the morpho-syntactic and lexical properties of cardinal adjectives, collective numeral nouns, numeral nouns and counters with respect to the varieties of word order.