Academic literature on the topic 'Negative adjective'

The article addresses problems of understanding and translation of morphologically complex words. It is not unusual for English adjectives with a negative prefix to have unexpected meanings that cannot be predicted based on examining the adjectives’ morphological structure. One such complex example is the adjective incapable. It is argued that this adjective has a peculiar set of meanings and uses that are independent of the positive form capable and unrelated to the adjective able. The article adduces evidence of specific uses of incapable, in which it showcases the meaning of ‘unfit for, unsuitable’ – not documented in most dictionaries.

Abstract In Japanese, the verbal negative marker nai appears in both negated verbs (as a sentential negator) and compound negative adjectives (as an affix). Negative nai used as a sentential negator is a syntactically independent word devoid of adjectival properties despite its adjectival inflection, whereas negative nai appearing in negative adjectives is a derivational affix. On the basis of idiomatic expressions, the present article argues that the lexical word nai ‘null, empty’ has developed into the affix nai while retaining its lexical properties via morphologization. On the other hand, the functional negator nai is argued to have emerged from the same lexical word nai via decategorialization, which induces a shift from a lexical to a functional category. The analysis taking the two uses of nai to trace back to the common source of the lexical negative adjective word nai provides a natural account for why nai has these two totally different uses.

The Positive Affect Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) has become one of the most widely used measures of mood. It was developed from research using responses to adjective checklists as empirical evidence for the two independent, bipolar factor model of mood. However, when scores on the PANAS were factor analyzed with those from another mood checklist, Thayer's Activation Deactivation Adjective Check List, the PANAS represented only half of the model proposed by Watson and Tellegen (1985) by not containing adjectives representing the lower poles of positive and negative affect.

This paper presents an analysis of the deep language factors that predetermine polysemy of English adjectives denoting moral and mental qualities of human beings. In line with a well-established point of view in cognitive linguistics, this study treats the semantics of a word as a two-level phenomenon possessing the semantic (external) level and the conceptual (internal) level. Given polysemy belongs to the external level, this study aims to reveal the internal language factor allowing for umbrella adjectives to develop meanings of moral and mental qualities. This is the first research that has analyzed English adjectives from this perspective; it is proposed to unearth the deep language foundation of polysemy by modeling the conceptual foundation of polysemantic adjectives, which is undertaken via analysis of their etymological data. The choice of the adjectives encoding moral and mental qualities is substantiated by the following reasons: first, these words name the major human characteristics, whose recognition and verbalization can be traced back to the Pre-Old English period; second, they denote abstract qualities unperceivable by senses but estimated due to their indirect manifestation in individuals’ judgments, conduct and activity; third, since these adjectives convey evaluation of the quality, they reflect cultural axiological standards. The findings show that the semantics of the English adjectives in question is governed by a certain set of conceptual metaphors. The commonality of the adjectives’ conceptual basis seems to be the internal language factor that accounts for polysemy, i.e. an ability for an adjective to comprise meanings of mental and moral characteristics. In addition, the results demonstrate that the unearthed concepts form oppositions, namely, LIFE - DEATH, MOTION - STILLNESS, FRIEND - FOE. The opposed concepts are endowed with the positive or negative value that appears to determine the evaluative meaning of the adjectives. Besides, the research has shown that, while participating in the formation of adjectival semantics, the concepts can demonstrate ambiguous value, which enables a concept to underlie both the positive and negative evaluative meanings of an adjective; therefore, an adjective may comprise meanings of mental and moral characteristics that are opposite in their evaluation.

This paper focuses on the cognitive foundation of the semantics of English adjectives that denote mental and moral characteristics of human beings. Research into these adjectives seems a challenging task because they denote abstract qualities that cannot be perceived through vision, hearing, or touch; and here a question arises: How are abstract qualities interpreted in English encoded through adjectives? To answer it, this study follows the idea of two-level semantics, i.e. word semantics is treated as a two-level phenomenon that comprises the semantic (external) level and the conceptual (deep) one. This study is the first to address adjectival semantics from this perspective. Here a novel approach to revealing the cognitive foundation of adjectives is introduced: given that adjectives originated from old syncretic items and a word cognitive model forms at the moment of word creation, cognitive models underlying adjectives' semantics are unearthed via analysis of their etymological data. Our contribution is two-fold. First, the approach has revealed that the image schema CONTAINER guides semantics of an array of various adjectives independent of their morphemic structure or date of origin. The examples demonstrate that abstract human qualities are interpreted via the following container features: boundary, container substance, size, hardness/softness of a container shell, etc. The semantics of affixed or compound adjectives appear to stem from the integration of concepts represented by an affix and a root or two roots, respectively. Second, the findings show that the value given to every container feature appears to predetermine the evaluation conveyed by an adjective. Container features tend to possess ambivalent value, realizing the positive or negative one due to the interaction with a frame in which the CONTAINER is incorporated, therefore the same polysemantic adjective may develop both positive and negative meanings. To reveal the whole inventory of cognitive models that govern adjectival semantics in English, further research needs to be conducted.

In order to provide textbook authors with empirical data on the acquisition in Dutch of written morphology in nouns, verbs and adjectives, several empirical studies have been undertaken. In this article, the third study reports on the performance of the morpheme -e in a special case of adjectives in Dutch: the adjectives derived from participles. The study tries to determine the possible interference between the morphological rules for verb inflection (past tense) and adjective declension in reading and writing. Five classes of adjectives were distinguished according to order of relative difficulty established a priori. Subjects (n=157, grade 6, 7 and 8 from two schools) individually completed a compre-hension and a production task in which factors were systematically varied. Also a recognition test on the spelling of the past tense of verbs was administered. The results showed an effect of categories of verbal adjectives in the production task, but only for groups 7 and 8; group 6 was not sensitive to the differences between the categories. In the recognition task, no effect of type of adjective (verbal or normal) was found for groups 7 and 8; but for group 6, performance on verbal adjectives was lower for the three most difficult categories of adjectives. In the production task, all three groups performed lower on verbal adjectives than normal adjectives in the two most difficult categories of adjectives. It turned out that groups which acquired spelling rules for the past tense of verbs to a higher level, made more errors in the spelling of verbal adjectives, especially in the two categories of adjectives which related the strongest to the spelling of verbs. It was concluded that indications were found that negative transfer or interference is present. Authors recommend changing the order of phases in which spelling rules are trained: from 'adjective declension-verb inflection (past tense)-verbal adjective declension' to 'adjective declension (including verbal adjective declension)-verb declension (past tense).

For the first time in linguistics, the article distinguishes negative pronouns of a pronoun-noun and pronoun-adjective. Their lexical meanings, grammatical features and syntactic functions are determined. A negative pronoun is a noun that means nothing (in Russian both - ничто and ничего ), a negative Russian pronoun что meaning whatever, none. Both pronouns function as the principle sentence component, mainly in negative genitive sentences or as a predicate in a two-memberSubject-Predicate sentence. Subject of a pronoun-noun, which is expressed by the noun of any lexico-grammatical category or infinitive, with a negative pronoun-adjective, which is an infinitive. Both negative pronouns function in rhetorical questions expressing negation in the affirmative form. Subject combined with a pronoun-noun could be expressed by a noun of any lexico-grammatical category or infinitive, with a negative pronoun-adjective что , which could also be formed by an infinitive. Both negative pronouns function in rhetorical questions expressing negation in the affirmative form. The meanings of both negative pronouns are syntactically limited (by the function of the predicate or the principle component of the negative genitive sentence) and structurally determined (be found in the construction with the dative of the authorizer). The meaning of a negative pronoun-adjective is also phraseologically confined, a negative pronoun is an adjective that is always used with the Russian words like проку, толку, выгоды, пользы, прибыли, добра . Three meanings stand out for a negative pronoun ничто : 1) ontological vacuum, nonexistence, absence of an object; 2) something insignificant, insignificant, not worthy of attention; 3) denial of the significance of a person, insignificance. A negative pronoun что is a noun that means something insignificant, insignificant, not worthy of attention (or (as it were) the absence of something/someone (for the authorizer)), or absence (of benefit). A negative pronoun что is an adjective that has one of the meanings of a negative pronoun-adjective никакой meaning none of the available or possible. Despite the indeclinability, a negative pronoun что expresses the noun-meanings of the nominative and genitive cases, while being a negative pronoun-adjective to denote the genitive case, either masculine or feminine. The data collected is retrieved from the National Corps of the Russian Language (NCRL). As the main methodological technique, the substitution method was applied. The theoretical basis of the article was the work on homocomplexes, functional homonyms, poly-functional words, the differentiation of homonymy and polysemy. The theoretical significance of the study lies in the fact that the results allow us expand the linguistic understanding of the semantic and grammatical nature of the pronoun as well as the issue of pronoun syncretism in general, the differentiation of homonymy and polysemy of the classes of pronouns, as well as the varieties of genitive sentences. The data collected can be useful for lexicographic practice: compiling dictionaries of homonyms, grammatical homonyms, explanatory dictionaries, as well as to clarify the typology of one-member sentences. The relevance of the topic is determined by the necessity to establish the full list of pronouns in the Russian language, as well as the importance of studying the phenomena of functional homonymy, transition and syncretism and the importance of solving the problem of distinguishing homonymy and polysemy.

Japanese has a fairly large set of complex adjectives formed by combining a noun with the adjective nai ‘null, empty’. The complex negative adjectives have the remarkable property that they allow nominative case marking to appear inside them optionally. We argue that these complex negative adjectives can be classified into three classes, and that the differences in their syntactic behaviour can be accounted for by positing three distinct morphosyntactic configurations (ranging from a fully phrasal structure to a complex word involving morphological compounding). Some, though not all, complex negative adjectives with case marking show a behaviour which suggests that they constitute single lexical units, while at the same time their components are susceptible to syntactic operations that normally do not apply to the internal structure of words. The data on the Japanese complex adjectives illustrate that adjectives formed via quasi-noun incorporation do not constitute words in a strict morphological sense, in that the entire complexes behave as lexical units, while their components remain visible syntactically.

In Old English, negative adjectives, i.e. incorporating the negative prefix -un, are said to generally come in postposition to nouns (e.g. Fischer, 2001; Sampson, 2010). This paper investigates to what extent this general rule is followed in Aelfric’s Catholic Homilies, the texts of this author being a typical choice for the study of Old English syntax (cf. Davis 2006; Reszkiewcz, 1966; Kohonen, 1978). The data have been obtained from the York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (YCOE). The following research questions have been formulated: Do strong negative adjectives outnumber nonnegated adjectives in postposition? Do strong negative adjectives have a tendency to appear in postposition? Do strong negated adjectives occur in preposition? The results indicated that for the sample analyzed, strong adjectives in postposition are not predominantly negated. Additionally, the postposition of most of those which are may potentially be explained by other factors, such as modification by a prepositional phrase, co-occurrence with a weak preposed adjective (both mentioned by Fischer), or indirect Latin influence in a formulaic phrase. Also, the data does not appear to support the observation that negated adjectives tend to appear in post- rather than preposition.