Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Attributive adjective'

This is a corpus-based study on adjective use in eighty written compositions by Swedish learners of English from Grade 7 and Grade 9 in junior high school, and from Year 1 and Year 3 in senior high school. The aims of the study are to conduct an analysis of the use of attributive adjectives in noun phrases, and to investigate how attributive adjective use contributes to the syntactic complexity of noun phrases. This study proposes a hypothesis of the complexity of noun phrases in relation to different types of attributive adjectives, that is to say, an assumption that more complex types of attributive adjectives contain more compact information that requires more effort to learn and use.  The investigation shows that Swedish learners of English in junior and senior high school use an overwhelming number of noun phrases without premodifiers. The findings confirm that less proficient students use more adjectives as premodifiers in noun phrases than nouns as premodifiers. The results of the examination also reveal that students from the four school levels investigated use the most common attributive adjectives frequently, which accouts for more than half of the attributive adjectives used. However, a positive trend is that the use of more complex types of adjectives, such as derivational and participial adjectives, steadily increases in number when students advance in school level.  The comparision of the most common attributive adjectives in proportion to other adjectives used in the data from each grade shows that more proficient students use a richer variety of adjectives than less proficient students. Some pedagogical implications in this connection are the need to raise Swedish students’ awareness of different types of adjectives in language teaching and learning. Other pedagogical suggestions are the need to develop students’ skills in elaborating ideas and consolidating syntactic structures in their writing.       Keywords: syntactic development, noun premodification, attributive adjective, Swedish learners of English

Ce travail de recherche consiste à démontrer que la place de l’adjectif dépend de contraintes syntaxiques, mais également de contraintes sémantiques et pragmatiques.L’analyse comparative entre un roman romantique et un roman naturaliste vise à montrer l’importance de la place de l’adjectif épithète au sein du texte, car ce phénomène permet à chaque écrivain de produire certains effets sur les lecteurs qui dépendent des intentions recherchées et par conséquent de l’œuvre étudiée.L'objectif de notre thèse consiste avant tout à montrer que l’adjectif, selon la place qu’il occupe, va permettre non seulement d’apporter différents types de précisions sur le référent désigné par le substantif, mais aussi de transmettre le point de vue du locuteur et de persuader le récepteur.Si bien que ce phénomène permet de montrer que chaque discours littéraire est unique et d’en expliquer le pourquoi<br>This research project consisted of showing that the place of the adjective depends not only on syntax but also on semantic and pragmatic constraints.A comparative analysis between a romance novel and a naturalist novel aims to show the importance of the place of the attributive adjective within a text, as this phenomenon allows each writer to produce certain effects on their readers which depend on the intention sought and, consequently, on the work studied.The objective of this thesis consists above all in showing that the adjective, depending on the place that it has, will not only allow for different types of precisions to be brought to the referent as designated by the substantive, but moreover to fulfil a macro-speech-act which constitutes a discourse act and also to transmit the speaker’s point of view and to convince the receiver. This phenomenon allows us to show that each literary discourse is unique and to explain the reasons for this

This thesis examines the order in which attributive adjectives are placed when appearing in a string modifying the same head noun. Noun phrases featuring more than one adjective are examined in six languages, all of which have modification patterns which exhibit distinctive patterns of syntax and morphology. Northern Sotho is a Bantu language with postnominal adjectives, agglutinative morphology and qualificative particles which link modifier and head; Welsh also has predominantly postnominal adjectives but less complex adjectival morphology. Polish and English adjectives typically appear before the noun, and the order in which they are sequenced is compared with Chinese, in which all modification appears before the noun, including relative clauses. I also examine the syntax of adjective strings in Tagalog, an Austronesian language in which adjectives can appear both before and after the noun, and in which the nature of lexical categories is particularly complex. The universality of the adjective class has generated considerable debate among linguists, with much discussion in the last decade with regard to whether adjectives constitute a independent lexical category across all languages. Chinese, Tagalog and Northern Sotho are all languages in which the nature of the adjectival category has been questioned, and this comparative analysis of a syntactic phenomenon which is an essential characteristic of adjectives adds a new dimension to the debate surrounding the universality of the adjective class. Based on a combination of corpus data and field-based methods, I analyse the patterns which appear across the languages in my sample. I evaluate the various explanations of the different factors which affect the order in which English adjectives are placed ahead of a noun, and relate my findings to equivalent structures in each of my focus languages, before proposing some conventions which appear to be consistent across a representative sample of languages.

<p>This study investigates how best to solve difficulties that may arise when translating bird literature from English into Swedish. The focus of the study lies on the translation of attributive adjectives and bird terminology. The text chosen for the translation, which serves as the basis for the analysis, is the section on general habits of the <em>Turdidae-family </em>in the comprehensive work <em>Handbook of the Birds of the World. </em>Translation theory that proved helpful in the translation process and in the subsequent analysis was primarily that of Vinay and Darbelnet (1995, 2004), Nida (1964a) and Newmark (1981). In most cases a literal translation could be perfonned, both in regard to attributive adjectives and bird tenninology, however, in some cases other translation procedures, such as transposition and equivalence, proved useful. Attributive adjectives that could not be translated literally, or that were preferred not to be translated literally, were translated through the use of transposition, into for instance: compound nouns, prepositional phrases, relative clauses and <em>that-clauses. </em>Bird terminology for which no suitable corresponding terminology could be found in the target language, was translated non-literally through the use of equivalence, into structures maintaining the equivalent semantic meaning in a natural way.</p>

Notre étude a commencé par une brève présentation de la langue persane et des parties du discours suivi par la démonstration de l'adjectif persan dans la grammaire contemporaine, notion floue dans les études antérieures. Étant donné que l'adjectif persan n'a pas de marquage flexionnel, cette étude exploratoire a pour but d’identifier des critères pertinents pour distinguer la catégorie adjectivale des autres catégories existantes (notamment nominale et verbale). Le résultat de ce travail nous a conduits à une étude morphosyntaxique et sémantique nous permettant de conclure au fait que l'adjectif persan est une sous-catégorie de la catégorie nominale<br>Our study begins with a brief presentation of the Persian language and the parts of speech followed by the demonstration of the Persian adjective in the contemporary grammar and to look for this vague notion in the previous studies. Given that the Persian adjective has no inflected marking, this search aims to identifying distinctive criteria to distinguish the adjectival category from the other existing categories (in particular nominal and verbal). The results of this work conduct us towards a morphosyntactic and semantic study which allowing us to conclude that the Persian adjective is a subcategory of the nominal category

Dans cette thèse, l’étude des verbes copules ser et estar est abordée de deux points de vue complémentaires. D'une part, une analyse grammaticale d'un large corpus d’occurrences orales authentiques est réalisée afin d'évaluer la pertinence de certains outils théoriques appartenant à une approche cognitive de la question. D’une autre part, à partir d’un contexte d’enseignement des langues secondes, une recherche expérimentale est menée pour examiner l’influence que le type d’approche grammaticale utilisée lors de l’enseignement peut avoir sur les résultats des apprenants. Dans les deux cas, la priorité est donnée à la validation empirique des hypothèses de travail suivant des méthodologies appartenant, dans un cas, à la linguistique et, dans un autre cas, à la didactique des langues. De cette manière, il a été possible d’identifier le champ de spécialisation de chacune des disciplines quant à la description des copules susmentionnées, ainsi que les points de convergence entre les champs d’étude concernés<br>In this thesis, the study of the Copulus verbs Ser and Estar is approached from two complementary points of view. On the one hand, a grammatical analysis of a large corpus of authentic oral occurrences is carried out in order to evaluate the relevance of certain theoretical tools belonging to a cognitive approach to the question. On the other hand, from a second language teaching context, experimental research is conducted to examine the influence that the type of grammatical approach used in teaching can have on learners' outcomes. In both cases, priority is given to the empirical validation of working hypotheses according to methodologies belonging, in one case, to linguistics and, in another case, to language didactics. In this way, it was possible to identify the field of specialization of each of the disciplines in terms of the description of the above-mentioned copulas, as well as the points of convergence between the fields of study concerned

This study investigates the adjectival passive, in accordance with Beedham's (2005, 1982) analysis of the passive as an aspect, with the caveat that telicity is an optimal, not sufficient, condition. The affinity of the adjectival passive with attributive participles and the existence of implicit agents in adjectival passives has divided opinion amongst linguists. The thesis deploys grammaticality judgment questionnaires surveying 1043 2nd participles and a corpus-based study investigating 1035 2nd participles. A subsective gradience (Aarts 2007, 2006, 2004) is modelled on five morpho-syntactic properties of 2nd participles: attributive function without modification, attributive function with modification, adjectival, verbal and prepositional passive, measuring formally the ability of 2nd participles to function like adjectives. The thesis consists of seven chapters. Chapter one introduces the research questions, adjectival passives and theoretical background. Chapter two reviews the aspect analysis, telicity, offers a qualification, and sets the theoretical approach. Chapter three is about the data and methodology. Chapter four discusses the affinity between adjectival passive and attributive participles. Chapter five discusses subsective gradience. Chapter six discusses the implications of the findings. Chapter seven gives a summary and conclusion. The empirical findings in our study provide further evidence in support of a subsective gradience in 2nd participles indicative of how ‘adjectival' a participle can be, on a continuum or gradient ranging from ‘verby' 2nd participles – relatively low compatibility with adjectival properties – to very adjectival 2nd participles. 2nd participles in this study are shown to have an inherent meaning of ‘action + state'. 2nd participles which form adjectival passives function attributively and form verbal passives. However, a 2nd participle functioning attributively does not entail that it will form an adjectival passive. There is evidence that attributive un- participles can host manner adverbials. It was also found that the interpretation of attributive participles goes beyond a simple passive/perfect dichotomy, and there are cases whereby a 2nd participle modifies an NP that is not an argument of the corresponding verb. This study makes a contribution to the wider analysis of the adjectival passive and provides further support for the similarity between adjectival and verbal passives.

<p>This study deals with difficulties of different nature encountered in the process of translating a tourist booklet on Dover Castle, published by English Heritage. The study focuses on grammatical aspects as the translation of the passive and attributive adjectives, and lexical aspects as the translation of terminology and cultural words and expressions. The analysis is based on Peter Newmark's translation theory and translation strategies. Passives and adjectives have been divided into groups based on the translation models and strategies used, and the focus is on changes in the grammatical structure. Most passives were rendered as passives in Swedish by the use of s-passives, which involves a change in the grammatical structure. Most adjectives in the source text were translated by the use of a corresponding adjective in the target language, with no change in the grammatical structure. However, some adjectives were translated using for example a prepositional phrase or a compound noun.</p><p>The analysis on terminology and cultural aspects focuses on what translation strategies have been used and problems that may occur concerning such aspects. Most source language terms were translated by the use of corresponding target language terms found in dictionaries or parallel texts. Some of the terms were transferred into the target text in their source text form, with an added explanation.</p><p>The cultural aspects consisted mainly of names, which were dealt with in different ways. Some were transferred using the source language form, and in some cases conventionalised Swedish forms were used. The main aim of the translation has been to render the text as natural as possible in Swedish, and the main aim of the analysis has been to discuss certain aspects of difficulty that occurred in the translation process.</p>

<p>This corpus-based study examines adjectives and adjectival expressions used to describe characters in British children’s fiction. The focus is on diachronic variation, by comparing Victorian (19th-century) and contemporary (late 20th-century) children’s fiction, and on gender variation, by comparing the descriptions of female and male characters. I adopt a qualitative as well as a quantitative approach, and consider factors such as lexical diversity, adjectival density, collocation patterns, evaluative meaning, syntactic function and distribution across semantic domains. Most findings are related to a dichotomy set up between an idealistic and a realistic portrayal of characters. The study shows that an idealistic portrayal of characters is typical of the Victorian material and a realistic portrayal of characters typical of the contemporary material. Further, gender differences are much more pronounced, and reflect traditional gender role patterns more in the Victorian material than in the contemporary material. For instance, a pleasant appearance is typically described for Victorian female characters and social position for Victorian male characters. Moreover, descriptions of mental properties of Victorian female characters are conspicuously rare. Such gendered patterns are less distinct in the contemporary material, although appearance is still more extensively described for female than male characters. As regards how the qualities are attributed to characters, the descriptions of Victorian female characters were found to be the most formulaic compared to the descriptions of Victorian male, contemporary female and contemporary male characters.</p>

Made available in DSpace on 2014-12-17T15:06:46Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 MKM.pdf: 917584 bytes, checksum: cea833f5d98c17ebc0535d899cf9f518 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2009-07-07<br>This present work has as objective to analyze the interpretation of the syntactic and semantic meaning performed by third graders in the nominal groups (NGs) with attributive adjectives in the English language in a text of the final exam in the ESP (English for Specific Purposes) discipline. The corpus is made up of 30 exams of two classes from a third grade institution of the biomedical area, corresponding to the basic and advanced levels of the second term in 2006. The text has 24 NGs of different lexical content, a total of 27 NGs in the whole text summing up to 810 analyzed occurrences. The analysis is carried out at the morphologic, syntactic and semantic levels using as theoretical background the traditional and functional grammars (QUIRK et al, 1985; CELSE-MURCIA et al, 1998; TUCKER, 1998), in their semantic aspects, the Semantics (FRAWLEY, 1992) and the Cognitive Linguistics (TAYLOR, 2002). We concluded that the main difficulties were due to the lack of vocabulary and to the use of mother tongue strategies instead of using the top-down strategies for reading a text in English to compensate this gap. We also observed that even when the vocabulary was known, there were difficulties in establishing the semantic and syntactic relations between modifier and noun head. We suggested improvements for the teaching of reading English texts at the third grade grounded in the obtained results such as a more comprehensive study of the several different morphologic and syntactic structures of the NGs with premodifiers and their semantic consequences, an approach of the morphologic, syntactic and semantic aspects of the NGs and the use of both top-down and bottom-up strategies when reading a NG in the English language<br>Este trabalho tem como objetivo analisar a interpreta??o do significado sint?tico e sem?ntico realizada por alunos universit?rios de Ingl?s Instrumental nos sintagmas nominais (SNs) com adjetivos atributivos na l?ngua inglesa em um texto da prova de final de semestre. O corpus ? constitu?do por 30 provas de duas turmas de uma institui??o de n?vel superior, da ?rea biom?dica, do segundo semestre de 2006, do n?vel b?sico e avan?ado. O texto da prova ? composto por 24 SNs de conte?do lexical diferente, num total de 27 SNs presentes no texto, totalizando 810 ocorr?ncias analisadas. Usamos como pressupostos te?ricos as gram?ticas tradicional (QUIRK et al, 1985) e funcionalista (CELSE-MURCIA et al, 1998; TUCKER, 1998), em seus aspectos sem?nticos, a Sem?ntica (FRAWLEY, 1992) e a Ling??stica Cognitiva (TAYLOR, 2003). Conclu?mos que as maiores dificuldades deveram-se ? falta de vocabul?rio, ao uso inadequado de estrat?gias da L?ngua Materna no lugar de se usar as estrat?gias descendentes de leitura para suprir esta falta. Observamos tamb?m que, mesmo quando se conhecia o vocabul?rio do SN, muitas vezes houve dificuldades em se perceber a rela??o sem?ntica e/ou sint?tica entre os modificadores e o n?cleo do SN acarretando inadequa??es de interpreta??o. Sugerimos melhorias para o ensino da leitura de textos em l?ngua inglesa nas universidades com base nos resultados obtidos, como um estudo mais detalhado das v?rias estruturas morfossint?ticas dos SNs com modificadores antepostos e suas conseq??ncias sem?nticas; uma abordagem conjunta dos aspectos morfol?gico, sint?tico e sem?ntico dos SNs com adjetivos atributivos na l?ngua inglesa e o uso das estrat?gias descendentes juntamente com as ascendentes ao se ler um SN na l?ngua inglesa

The diploma thesis deals with the distinction of attributive and predicative adjectives in contemporary Czech. Although this distinction is very important for defining adjectives as a word class in many languages, there was only little attention paid to it in Czech so far. This thesis is based on the work of František Čermák Lexikon a sémantika (2010). It is strongly inspired by english tradition of linguistics, which is also a reason, why he introduces a new term predicative adjectives in Czech. The thesis is divided into two parts. The first part contains theoretical description of predicative and attributive function of adjectives. It is based on information contained in czech and foreign grammarbooks, handbooks or research papers. The goal is to summarize these separate information. The theoretical part deals with the basic characteristic of both types of adjectives, it focuses also on description of their semantics, word form and valency, which depends on it. This part contains definitions of some questionable points or inaccuracies of these descriptions too. The second part of this thesis is given to corpus research. The questionable points or inaccuracies of the descriptions defined in the first part of this thesis are examined on the material of Czech national corpus, concretely the corpus SYN2010....

The objective of the thesis is to describe and compare the modifying uses of two adjectives which can appear both as premodifiers as well as bare postmodifiers, namely available and responsible. Both modifying positions are examined with respect to the textual environment, the complexity of noun phrases and adjective phrases in which the adjectives function, reference and other features in order to outline the patterns in which these two adjectives appear. The data for the analytical part have been extracted from the British National Corpus using the basic query and limiting the search to the written part of the corpus. After manual assessment of the initial samples of 500 concordance lines, 154 concordance lines containing the adjective available and 147 containing the adjective responsible proved to be suitable for the analysis. The final samples of the data are further categorized and analysed concerning the complexity of the noun phrase, premodification, postmodification and complementation of the adjectives, semantic preference of the head nouns, and the motivation for the pre- or postnominal placement of the modifiers. Key words: adjective, adjective phrase, premodification, postmodification, complementation, attributive function, predicative function, postpositive function, bare adjective,...

The aim of the given thesis is to expound the problem of syntax processing by creating adjectival compounds in dictionary entries for the Large German-Czech Academic Dictionary. Assuming that exactly these words, which belong to the complicated vocabulary items, cause difficulties for foreign speakers with text comprehension and text production. It is based on the nature of German language, which makes many compounds, as opposed to in Czech language. Not only are the meanings of these words revealed to be problematic, but also their usage. The thesis is divided into two parts. The theoretical part deals with characteristics of adjectives as word class, and because each word always has its context, attention will be primarily focused on the adjectival valency. Previously, only the valency of verbs and substantives has been discussed. When a native speaker automatically knows these syntax structures and even when, in case of foreign language, there could exist structural similarities between the source and target language, the structures ought consequently to be given in the dictionary. In some mono- or bilingual dictionary the user should find complex informations for word searched. The practical part involves analysis of ten chosen adjective compounds, which shows how the valency structures are...

博士<br>國立中山大學<br>中國文學系研究所<br>106<br>Abstract The Chinese adjectives “duo(多)”, “shao(少)” and “gou(夠)” show some peculiarities in their use. Modification of nouns using “duo(多)” is not the same as for other adjectives. For example, “新的習慣” (new habit), and “ 新的工廠” (new factory) are correct, but “多的習慣”, and “多的工廠” are not. They must be written as “很多習慣” (many habits), and “很多工廠” (many factories). The Japanese adjectives “ooi(多い)”, “sukunai(少ない)”, “tooi(遠い)” and “chikai(近い)” also show some peculiarities in their use. “Ooi” is not used in the same way as other adjectives as it cannot directly modify nouns. For example, “新しい習慣” (new habit), and “新しい工場” (new factory) are correct, but “多い習慣”, and “多い工場” are not. They must be changed to “多くの習慣” (many habits), and “多くの工場” (many factories). This dissertation addresses the attribute usage of quantitative adjectives in Chinese and Japanese from the perspective of Chinese and Japanese language teaching.I have taken the Chinese adjectives “duo”, “shao”, and “gou”, and the Japanese adjectives “ooi”, “sukunai”, “tooi”, and “chikai” as my research subject, and have attempted to clarify the various ways in which these adjectives are used. This dissertation is divided into four sections as follows: First, corpus analysis was performed to identify the universal and basic attribute usage of Chinese adjectives including “duo”, and of Japanese adjectives including “ooi”. Second, analysis of the problems of Chinese/Japanese translation was performed, specifically, analysis of translating the Japanese adjectives “ooi”, “sukunai”, “tooi”, and “chikai” into Chinese, and the Chinese adjectives “duo”, “shao”, and “gou” into Japanese. Particular attention should be paid to the special attribute usage rules of these adjectives when translating them. Third, to apply the research results to teaching, we should identify how previously published textbooks have dealt with the issues related to attribute usage of adjectives, and identify the best approach in order to design the ideal teaching methodology for attribute usage of adjectives. Fourth, contrastive analysis of the solid compounds with the initial characters of “多” and “少” in Chinese and Japanese dictionaries was performed. The common solid compounds identified in the contrastive analyses are helpful for Chinese speaking learners of Japanese, and vice versa.