The aim of this article is to investigate the usage of a selected denominal adjective in English, namely the lexeme managerial. The data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) are employed to examine the occurrence of managerial as a qualitative adjective, a thematic relational adjective and a non-thematic (i.e. classifi catory) relational adjective. The question is considered whether relational adjectives can be treated as argument-saturating satellites of deverbal nouns.