This paper reports on a large-scale, statistical analysis of corpus data to support the null hypothesis that ethnic adjectives (EAs, e.g. French) are ordinary adjectives, rather than argument-saturating \nouns in disguise" (in, e.g., French agreement). In particular, EAs are argued to simply modify the noun they combine with; their special properties in inducing argument-like behavior arises from the interaction between the semantics of event nominals and that of the adjective.

This work was supported by grants from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (FFI2010-15006, TIN2009-14715-C04-04 (KNOW-II), JCI-2010-08581), as well as by the European Union via the EU PASCAL2 Network of Excellence (FP7-ICT-216886) and by the Fundació ICREA.