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"English language Adjective."
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Many luscious lollipops : a book about adjectives
Brief rhymed text and pictures introduce adjectives and their uses.
Book
Deverbal Adjectives at the Interface
This volume explores the syntax, semantics, and morphology of -ble adjectives within Distributed Morphology. It presents a decompositional analysis of -ble that captures intralinguistic variation and accounts for morphologically more complex languages. It contributes novel empirical data. First, the grammaticality of -ble formations derived from unergatives and unaccusatives in Spanish is argued to be a function of their exoskeletal properties in interaction with language-specific facts and features of the grammar of cognation, degrees, quantification and Aktionsart. A previously unnoticed correlation between the Spanish data and a cognate configuration with unaccusatives in English reinforces the proposal. Second, the grammaticality of denominal -ble adjectives in Romance and their absence in English relates aspects of the internal structure of -ble to issues pertaining to the eventive properties and syntactico-semantic status of the base nouns. This crosslinguistic proposal implicates central issues in the syntax-semantics-morphology interface, e.g. cross category derivations, locus of variation, or status of impossible words.
eBook
Small, smaller, smallest
Introduces differences in size by comparing groups of small animals, such as small birds, turtles, and fish.
Book
English Adjectives of Comparison
The book is concerned with a hitherto underresearched grammaticalization process: the development from quality-attributing adjective to determiner in the English noun phrase. It takes a bottom-up approach, based on extensive synchronic and diachronic corpus studies of six English adjectives of comparison: other, different, same, identical, similar and comparable. Their functional diversity in current English is proposed to constitute a case of layering, representing the original descriptive use, which expresses how like/unlike each other entities are, and a range of grammaticalized referential uses, which contribute to the identification and/or quantification of the entities denoted by the NP. Diachronic and comparative data material is invoked to verify and further develop the grammaticalization hypothesis.
The development of adjectives of comparison involves several key concepts identified in the literature. Crucially, it is described as a case of textual intersubjectification driven by the optimalization of recipient-design. The actual grammaticalization paths are diverse and are characterized by lexical as well as structural persistence, i.e. the same lexical meaning develops into different grammatical functions in different syntagmatic configurations.
In order to define the NP as a locus of diachronic change, this study offers a new angle on the description of adjectives and the modelling of NP structure. It advocates the abandonment of the traditional class-based model in favour of a radically functional one, in which functions are defined in terms of prototypicality so as to allow for gradience between and within them. The described grammaticalization processes involve developments from prototypical lexical to grammatical reference-related use within the adjectival category, which can be the starting point of further gradual change to determiners. The traditional relation between classes and positions is envisaged as a correspondence between functional and syntactic zones. The change in form concomitant with grammaticalization in the NP is argued to consist of the reconfiguration of structural combinatorics and progressive leftward movement.
The book is of interest to linguistic researchers and graduate students in linguistics who focus their attention on grammaticalization and subjectification, the functional description of adjectives, questions of deixis and theoretical issues relating to nominal reference.
eBook
Long, longer, longest
Introduces differences in lengths by comparing lengths of baseball diamonds, tennis courts, Olympic swimming pools and other distances in sports.
Book
Modal Adjectives
The book revisits the notion of deontic modality from the perspective of an understudied category in the modal domain, viz. adjectives. On the basis of synchronic and diachronic corpus studies, it analyses the semantics of English adjectives like essential and appropriate, and uses this to refine traditional definitions of deontic modality, which are mainly based on the study of modal verbs.
In a first step, it is shown that the set of meanings expressed by extraposition constructions with deontic adjectives is quite different from the set of meanings identified in the literature on modal verbs. Adjectival complement constructions lack the directive meanings of obligation or permission, which are traditionally regarded as the core deontic categories, and they have semantic extensions towards non-modal meanings in the evaluative domain. In a second step, the analysis of adjectives is used to propose an alternative definition of deontic modality, which covers both the meanings of verbs and adjectives, and which can deal with the different extensions towards modal and non-modal categories. This is integrated into a conceptual map, which works both in diachrony, defining pathways of change from premodal to modal to evaluative meaning, and in synchrony, accommodating refinements within each set of meanings. In the process, this study points to the emergence of partially filled constructions, and it offers additional evidence for well-established changes in the history of English, such as the decline of the subjunctive and the rise of the to-infinitive in complement constructions.
The book is of particular interest to researchers and graduate students with a focus on mood and modality, and the interface between syntax, semantics and pragmatics, as well as that between synchrony and diachrony.
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
More support for more-support : the role of processing constraints on the choice between synthetic and analytic comparative forms
This book provides the most comprehensive account so far of novel and hitherto unexplained factors operative in the choice between synthetic (prouder) and analytic (more proud ) comparatives. It argues that the underlying motivation in using the analytic variant is to mitigate processing demands - a compensatory strategy referred to as more -support. The analytic variant is claimed to be better suited to environments of increased processing complexity - presumably owing to its ability to facilitate early phrase structure recognition, the more transparent one-to-one relation between form and function and possibly because the degree marker more can serve as a structural signal foreshadowing cognitive complexity. A bird's eye view of 24 determinants reveals that the processing effort which triggers the analytic comparative emanates from structures that are phonologically, morphologically, syntactically, lexically, semantically or pragmatically complex. By bridging the gap between corpus-based variation research and psycholinguistic and typological approaches, the book breaks new ground in uncovering the functional motivation behind the continued variability of synthetic-analytic contrasts.
eBook
Big, bigger, biggest
Introduces differences in size by comparing groups of big animals, such as big turtles, wildcats, and ocean creatures.
Book
Adjectives : formal analyses in syntax and semantics
Adjectives are comparatively less well studied than the lexical categories of nouns and verbs. The present volume brings together studies in the syntax and semantics of adjectives. Four of the contributions investigate the syntax of adjectives in a variety of languages (English, French, Mandarin Chinese, Modern Hebrew, Russian, Spanish, and Serbocroatian). The theoretical issues explored include: the syntax of attributive and predicative adjectives, the syntax of nominalized adjectives and the identification of adjectives as a distinct lexical category in Mandarin Chinese. A further four contributions examine different aspects in the semantics of adjectives in English, French, and Spanish, dealing with superlatives, comparatives, and aspect in adjectives. This volume will be of interest to researchers and students in syntax, formal semantics, and language typology.
eBook