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"Adjective"
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Many luscious lollipops : a book about adjectives
Brief rhymed text and pictures introduce adjectives and their uses.
Book
The Impact of L1 Transfer on Learning English Adjective Order by Saudi EFL Learners
This study examined the impact of first language (L1) on adjective ordering among Saudi English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. The main hypothesis posited that the presence of a common adjective ordering convention in both Arabic and English would influence the proficiency and accuracy of Saudi EFL learners in generating this specific ordering in English. To test this hypothesis, 36 Saudi EFL learners representing high and low levels of proficiency were selected. They were instructed to arrange a set of adjectives in three combinations: non-absolute + absolute (NA), absolute + absolute (AA), and non-absolute + non-absolute (NN). Statistical analyses revealed that the performance of the NA combination, which exists in both languages, was superior to the NN and AA combinations for all participants. Additionally, a significant interaction was observed between the participants' proficiency levels and the adjective combinations, with the high-proficiency group outperforming the low-proficiency group in all combinations. These findings suggest that L1 influence may have a role in learning English adjective ordering and emphasize the importance of considering L1 transfer in EFL instruction.
Journal Article
Small, smaller, smallest
Introduces differences in size by comparing groups of small animals, such as small birds, turtles, and fish.
Book
Perceptual, Semantic, and Pragmatic Factors Affect the Derivation of Contrastive Inferences
People derive contrastive inferences when interpreting adjectives (e.g., inferring that ‘the short pencil’ is being contrasted with a longer one). However, classic eye-tracking studies revealed contrastive inferences with scalar and material adjectives, but not with color adjectives. This was explained as a difference in listeners’ informativity expectations, since color adjectives are often used descriptively (hence not warranting a contrastive interpretation). Here we hypothesized that, beyond these pragmatic factors, perceptual factors (i.e., the relative perceptibility of color, material and scalar contrast) and semantic factors (i.e., the difference between gradable and non-gradable properties) also affect the real-time derivation of contrastive inferences. We tested these predictions in three languages with prenominal modification (English, Hindi, and Hungarian) and found that people derive contrastive inferences for color and scalar adjectives, but not for material adjectives. In addition, the processing of scalar adjectives was more context dependent than that of color and material adjectives, confirming that pragmatic, perceptual and semantic factors affect the derivation of contrastive inferences.
Journal Article
Long, longer, longest
Introduces differences in lengths by comparing lengths of baseball diamonds, tennis courts, Olympic swimming pools and other distances in sports.
Book
The Syntax of Adjectives
A new analysis of adjectives, supported by comparative evidence.
In The Syntax of Adjectives, Guglielmo Cinque offers cross-linguistic evidence that adjectives have two sources. Arguing against the standard view, and reconsidering his own earlier analysis, Cinque proposes that adjectives enter the nominal phase either as “adverbial” modifiers to the noun or as predicates of reduced relative clauses. Some of his evidence comes from a systematic comparison between Romance and Germanic languages. These two language families differ with respect to the canonical position taken by adjectives, which is prenominal in Germanic and both pre- and postnominal in Romance. Cinque shows that a simple N(oun)-raising analysis encounters a number of problems, the primary one of which is its inability to express a fundamental generalization governing the interpretation of pre- and postnominal adjectives in the two language families. Cinque argues that N-raising as such should be abandoned in favor of XP-raising—a conclusion also supported by evidence from other language families. After developing this framework for analyzing the syntax of adjectives, Cinque applies it to the syntax of English and Italian adjectives. An appendix offers a brief discussion of other languages that appear to distinguish overtly between the two sources of adjectives.
eBook
Tall, taller, tallest
Introduces differences in height by comparing groups of tall landmarks and structures throughout the world, such as skyscrapers, bridges, and mountains.
Book
No Adjective Ordering Preferences in Jordanian Arabic Grammar
This article offers evidence, which is based on acceptability judgement tasks, in favour of the absence of unmarked linear serializations of stacked, non-coordinated adjectives in Jordanian Arabic (JA). Results from 16 experiments of acceptability judgements from 197 native speakers of JA point to the fact that JA places no adjective ordering. However, two factors are found to be significant. The first factor pertains to the number of stacked, non-coordinated adjectives. All possible word order patterns of different stacked adjectives are (fully) acceptable with two stacked adjectives. However, constructions with three or more stacked adjectives are significantly degraded. This is universally held, regardless of the type of the stacked adjectives (size, color, shape, etc.). We ascribe this to the third-factor effects (Chomsky in Linguist Inq 36(1):1–22, 2005) (particularly with reference to working memory and processing load) in restricting the possible number of adjectives in a given construction. A second factor relates to the syntactic position of the adjectives (attributive vs. predicative). The results reveal that attributive adjectives are significantly more acceptable than predicative adjectives (which can also be freely stacked in JA). This is also attributed to the effects of these factors favoring minimal computations. We follow O’Grady (Front Psychol 12:660296, 2021) in that the processing of across-clausal phenomena (as is the case with predicative adjectives) is more demanding than intra-clausal ones (as is the case with attributive adjectives).
Journal Article
Big, bigger, biggest
Introduces differences in size by comparing groups of big animals, such as big turtles, wildcats, and ocean creatures.
Book
On the order of demonstrative, numeral, adjective, and noun
This article reports on a typological study of the order of demonstrative, numeral, adjective, and noun, based on a sample of 576 languages. I propose a set of five surface principles which interact to predict the relative frequencies of the different orders of these four elements, whereby the more principles an order conforms to, the more frequent it will be. I provide evidence that the relative frequencies of the different orders can only be described and explained in terms of semantic notions of demonstrative, numeral, and adjective, independent of their syntactic realization, and not in terms of syntactic categories. I compare my approach to a generative account of the same phenomenon by Cinque (2005). I argue that my approach accounts for the relative frequencies of the different orders better than Cinque's in a number of respects.
Journal Article