Academic literature on the topic 'Adjective. eng'

This chapter discusses several more epistemic adjectives. Certain and its near-synonym sure are maximum adjectives that combine with proportional and percentage modifiers. A comparison with non-modal adjectives suggests a ratio-scale classification with at least an upper bound. Several lines of evidence indicate that certainty and likelihood are formally closely related. However, there are puzzles around the interpretation of uncertain that indicate that the relation may not be one of identity. I consider three possible analyses, all of which have certain advantages and drawbacks. I then turn to possible, which is often claimed to be non-gradable. Naturalistic data indicate that possibility is a graded concept (e.g., increase the possibility of), and that possible is gradable (e.g., too/very/n% possible). While an analysis in terms of some kind of scalar coercion is technically feasible, the most natural explanation is that possible is a gradable adjective whose scale is closely related to likely’s scale.

This chapter investigates the syntactic derivation of Chinese resultatives. While in English resultatives the [uDiv] feature is valued with the mechanism of feature sharing, in Chinese resultatives it is valued by a verbal C-functor, by nature equivalent to en in flatten. The Chinese V–V resultative compound is a single de-adjectival verb: the first verb is a verbal C-functor and the second one is an adjective. The V–V resultative construction is therefore analyzed as a causative construction involving a de-adjectival verb. This single hypothesis provides a unified account of the seemingly mysterious properties of Chinese resultatives as well as the differences from English resultatives. This account is based on a general hypothesis of Synchronic Grammaticalization: in an analytical language like Chinese where there is only a very limited array of functional items, lexical items are selected to serve as functional items to meet the universal requirement of feature valuation.

This chapter explores the semantic properties of verbs and adjectives with closely related meanings having to do with desires and goals. I evaluate recent work on verbs of desire (e.g. ‘want’) which has suggested that these attitude predicates require access to multiple alternatives for their interpretation (Villalta 2006, 2008). I argue that this heavy machinery is in fact not required, integrating important insights proposed in this recent work into a quantificational modal analysis of comparison-based attitudes. The proposed analysis highlights the similarities and differences between ‘want’ and ‘necessary’, an adjective that is shown (including naturalistic corpus data) to be primarily goal-oriented and to be semantically dependent to a certain degree on the syntactic configuration it appears in. Whether or not the modality is lexically relativized to an individual is also suggested to play a role in defining the semantic properties of desire- and goal-oriented modal expressions.

In 1996, Peter Lasersohn discovered a construction in which an if-clause appears as an NP-modifier, rather than a sentential adjunct (e.g. The price if you pay now is predictable). He dubbed these types of if-clauses “adnominal conditionals” (ACs). Building on Lasersohn’s proposal that ACs are NP modifiers, this chapter provides a compositional analysis of ACs within a restrictor-based analysis of conditionals (Lewis 1975; Kratzer 1986; Heim 1982). According to my proposal, ACs always restrict the domain of an operator within the NP they modify (a modal adjective), and when there is no overt operator within the NP, ACs restrict the domain of a covert necessity modal adjective (cf. Kratzer 1986’s analysis of matrix indicative conditionals).

The book provides a comprehensive description and in-depth analysis of the major word order changes affecting the clausal and the nominal domains in the transition from old to modern Romanian. The Romanian data are set in a comparative Romance perspective, and the impact of the Balkan Sprachbund and the influence of Old Church Slavonic on the word order changes taking place in the transition from old to modern Romanian are also analysed. The book examines a large number of phenomena: some of them are found across Romance (e.g. scrambling, interpolation, discontinuous constituents, variation in the position and linearization of DP-internal adjectival modifiers), others are rare in Romance (e.g. a low pronominal cliticization site), and still others are specific to old or modern Romanian (e.g. the double, proclitic and enclitic, realization of the same pronominal clitic, the low definite article, the adjectival article construction).

This reference grammar of Gothic includes much history along with a description of Gothic grammar. Apart from runic inscriptions, Gothic is the earliest attested language of the Germanic family in Indo-European. Specifically, it is East Germanic. Most of the extant Gothic corpus is a 4th-century translation of the Bible, traditionally ascribed to Wulfila. This translation is historically important because it antedates Jerome’s Latin Vulgate. Gothic inflectional categories include nouns, adjectives, and verbs. Nouns are inflected for three genders, two numbers, and four cases. Adjectives also have weak and strong forms, as do verbs. Verbs are inflected for three persons and numbers, indicative and nonindicative mood (here called optative), past and nonpast tense, and voice. The mediopassive survives as a synthetic passive and syntactically in innovated periphrastic formations. Middle and anticausative functions were taken over by simple reflexive structures. Nonfinite are the infinitive, the imperative, and two participles. Gothic was a null subject language. Aspect was effected primarily by prefixes, relativization by relative pronouns built on demonstratives plus a complementizer. Complementizers were the norm with subordinated verbs in the indicative or optative. Switch to the optative was triggered by irrealis (the unreal), matrix verbs that do not permit a full range of subordinate tenses (e.g. hopes, wishes), potentiality, and alternate worlds. Many of these are also relevant to matrix clauses (independent optatives). Essentials of linearization include prepositional phrases, default postposed genitives and possessive adjectives, and preposed demonstratives. Verb-object order predominates, but there is considerable variation. Verb-auxiliary order is native Gothic.

This chapter presents various ways of presenting the response options to the respondent. It begins by discussing why dichotomous responses (e.g. yes/no, true/false) are often inadequate. Different alternatives are discussed, including direct estimation methods (e.g. visual analogue scales, adjectival scales, Likert scales), comparative methods (e.g. paired comparisons, Guttman scaling), and econometric methods. It reviews some of the issues that need to be considered in writing the response options, such as whether one should use a unipolar or bipolar scale, how many steps there should be, and whether all the response options need to be labelled. It also covers what statistical tests can legitimately be used with scales. Finally, it compares ratings with rankings, and introduces the method of multidimensional scaling.

The comprehensive nature of John Palsgrave’s endeavour to analyse and describe the French language in Lesclarcissement de la langue francoyse (1530) also encompasses the formation of words. Whereas Chapter 6 focused on his pioneering achievement as a grammarian and lexicographer, this chapter describes his most impressive work as a sixteenth-century lexicologist analysing the word-structures of a vernacular. The coining of words is embedded in a word class-based grammatical framework. For each word class, e.g. nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, etc., he discusses the formative processes (derivation and composition), specifies the formal patterns (with their changes to the base), paraphrases the meaning of each formation, and then provides a good number of examples. Exceptions are also pointed out.

This chapter uses statistical tools to investigate the interrelationship between typological features in the World Atlas of Language Structures Online (Dryer and Haspelmath 2013) in the WALS 201 language sample, with the objective of determining how crosscategorial word order generalizations might emerge as the result of syntactic change. Multiple Correspondence Analysis and a variety of cluster analyses show that word order features tend to group along the familiar lines of the Head Parameter. But there is an important caveat to this, previously noticed by Albu (2006): word order features in NP (e.g. [Order of noun and determiner], [Order of noun and adjective]) group separately from word order features in VP and PP, with the exception of [Order of noun and genitive]. We provide a diachronic explanation for this fact: nouns and their arguments may be reanalysed as PPs, or in the case of reanalysed nominalizations, clauses.

This chapter reviews a series of replications of the studies reported in previous chapters on eight typologically distinct language pairs, making use of a wide array of phonological, morphological, and syntactic diagnostics (e.g., vowel harmony, word order, case-marking, adjectival expression, nominal determination patterns, verb incorporation strategies). Wherever a conflict site between donor and recipient languages could be determined, lone items were systematically shown to behave like the latter, often to the point of assuming the fine details of its variable quantitative conditioning. Results confirm that the integration process and its outcome—grammatical identity of donor-language items with recipient-language counterparts—are universal.