Abstract

The inflection of modifiers in Romance ATAP compounds is a complex phenomenon that poses a serious challenge to linguistic theory. From the global point of view, French and Italian exhibit opposite tendencies, since most Italian modifiers in ATAP compounds are regularly invariable, while the majority of modifiers in French ATAP compounds display regular plural marking. Nevertheless, in both languages there are modifiers that regularly go against the general tendency. In this paper, it is argued that these phenomena may be accounted for by the same principles, provided that the different word-formation and inflectional paradigms in ATAP compounds are viewed as interrelated. The conclusions are supported by extensive corpus data.