Academic literature on the topic 'Restrictive adjective'

Adjectives appear predominantly postnominally in Spanish, and when prenominal, cannot be interpreted as restrictive. We explore whether heritage speakers of Spanish have the same interpretive and ordering restriction as monolinguals. Twenty-two US college-age heritage speakers and 17 college-age monolinguals from Peru completed a rating task that manipulated word order and interpretation. Items varied in word order (Adj-N/N-Adj) and interpretation (restrictive-only, color and nationality adjectives, and ambiguous adjectives, restrictive and non-restrictive), all framed within a context that favored a restrictive interpretation. Both groups judged Adj-N orders lower than N-Adj orders, and restrictive adjectives lower in prenominal position than ambiguous adjectives. Consequently, we argue that heritage speakers (HS) have the relevant knowledge regarding word order and interpretation, and the interactions among the two properties. We propose a syntactic representation involving NP-raising for both groups, and suggest that in some cases, the higher copy of the NP is deleted, resulting in the linear order Adj-N. We also argue that this analysis may explain the range of individual variation across heritage speakers.

Prior studies have examined the association between modifying adjective placement and interpretation in second language (L2) Spanish. These studies show evidence of convergence with native speaker’s intuitions, which is interpreted as restructuring of the underlying grammar. Two issues deserve further study: (i) there are debates on the nature of native speaker’s interpretations; (ii) previous results could be explained by a combination of explicit instruction and access to the first language (L1). The present study re-examines native and non-native intuitions on the interpretation of variable order adjectives in pre-nominal and post-nominal positions, and extends the domain of inquiry by asking if L2 learners have intuitions about the order of two-adjective sequences, which appear in mirror image order in English and Spanish (faded blue pants vs. pantalones azules desteñidos). Two-adjective sequences are rare in the input, not typically taught explicitly, and have a different word order that cannot be [partially] derived from the L1 subgrammar. Two groups of non-native speakers (n = 50) and native speaker controls (n = 15) participated in the study. Participants completed a preference task, testing the interaction between word order and restrictive/non-restrictive interpretation, and an acceptability judgement task, testing ordering intuitions for two-adjective sequences. Results of the preference task show that the majority of speakers, both native and non-native, prefer variable adjectives in a post-nominal position independent of interpretation. Results of the acceptability judgement task indicate that both native and non-native speakers prefer mirror image order. We conclude that these results support underlying grammar reanalysis in L2 speakers and indicate that the semantic distribution of variable adjectives is not fully complementary; rather, the post-nominal position is unmarked, and generally preferred by both native and non-native speakers.

In terminology, the predominance of nouns is an incontestable phenomenon. In Korean terminologies, this predominance of nouns is even more notable because the meaning and function associated with adjectives in Indo-European languages are often realized in noun form. However, the rarer adjectival terms are, the more they are used in restrictive, repetitive ways in specialized domains. Thus, it is important to distinguish the different senses of these terms. In this work, focusing on semantic characterization in terminology, we distinguish the different senses of adjectival medical terms by applying lexico-semantic criteria (L’Homme 2004a) and by classifying the arguments of the adjective into semantic categories (Bae et al. 2002). With this work, we aim to enrich terminological descriptions found in Korean medical dictionnaries by demonstrating empirically a method for distinguishing the different senses of adjectival medical terms. To achieve our goal, we used the KAIST corpus, composed of medical texts (1,500,000 eojeols), and a group of texts on various subjects (40,000,000 eojeols).

Greek polydefinites are cases of adjectival modification where the adjective features its own definite determiner. We propose an account of the phenomenon that treats it as an instance of close apposition. Like close appositives, polydefinites in Greek instantiate multiple definite determiners, display a freedom in word order, and involve a restrictive interpretation. We propose that close apposition in Greek forms a complex DP out of two DPs which are in a sisterhood relationship through identification of the Referential roles within the DPs. This operation, semantically tantamount to set intersection, is constrained to apply only when the resulting set is not co-extensive with either initial set. This ensures the restrictive interpretation of one DP over the other. The fact that in polydefinites, it is always the DP containing the adjective that obligatorily satisfies the constraint has to do with the presence of noun ellipsis within that DP: (noun) ellipsis is known to come with a disanaphora requirement. We show that noun ellipsis is also responsible for the distribution of adjectives and adjective interpretations, as well as those discourse effects of polydefinites that have been thought of as the result of a DP-internal Focus projection. Finally, we make a proposal for the encoding of definiteness in Greek, consonant both with the existence of polydefinites in the language and with the prerequisite for set intersection among DPs: the overtly realized Greek definite determiner does not itself contribute an iota operator but preserves the <e,t>denotation at the DP level. Our proposal thus deals not only with the multiple occurrence of definite determiners in a construction that picks out a single discourse referent, but also with the compositionality problem that such a situation gives rise to. In the final part we tie the cross-linguistic (un)availability of expletive determiners of the Greek type to the (un)availability of morphologically realized case.

Since choosing 30 words that best describe a target from 50 positive and 50 negative words on the Personal Attribute Inventory may have been artificially restrictive, in the present study 58 college students chose as many adjectives as appropriate; the score was proportionally adjusted according to the number of adjectives checked. Subjects' positive and negative scores were significantly correlated with scores on the favorable subscale (.31) and the unfavorable subscale (.59), respectively, of the parent scale, the Gough (1952) Adjective Check List. Test-retest correlations on the revised version for positive (.65) and negative (.65) scores were significant. Lower test-retest correlations were obtained for the favorable subscale (.35) and the unfavorable subscale (.43) of Gough's check list. Implications are discussed.

Adjectives in definite Determiner Phrases of Zarma, a Nilo-Saharan language trigger an additional (suffixed/base-merged) lexical determiner; in the event of adjectives modifying nouns, definite determiners can occur with either the nouns or the adjectives or both. In all of these cases, no different readings obtain. Structured interviews were conducted with Zarma native speakers to collect the data for this study. I analyse the phenomenon as a case of definite determiner doubling which does not bear on any form of agreement relations. I further suggest that definite determiner and its subsets – numeral, demonstrative, and quantifier do not overlap. However, each of these can occur alongside adjectives within the DP. Consequently, I consider the adjective as an exponent of the adjunct category. Based on Abney’s DP-Hypothesis and the restrictive theory of the Minimalist Program, the paper argues that the asymmetry in the surface realizations of elements/constituents within the Zarma DP is the effect of movement.

Both relative adjectives (RAs) like ‘big’ and absolute adjectives (AAs) like ‘empty’ are sensitive to the context: in the former case, the context determines how much size is required to count as big; in the latter, the context determines how much deviation from total emptiness is allowed to count as empty. Whereas it is generally agreed that the role of context with RAs is to fix the value of a threshold variable, the status of absolute adjective thresholds, and therefore the role of context in their interpretation, remains an object of debate. Some researchers have argued that all gradable adjectives have context-sensitive threshold variables that are assigned values by the same mechanisms (Lassiter & Goodman 2013). Others have claimed that AAs have fixed, endpoint-oriented meanings and that sensitivity to context arises from pragmatic reasoning about imprecision (Kennedy 2007; Syrett, Kennedy & Lidz 2009; van Rooij 2011; Burnett 2014; Qing & Franke 2014). In an eye-tracking Visual World experiment, we investigate RAs and AAs used as restrictive modifiers. We find that target identification is significantly faster for both types of adjectives when the visual context supports a restrictive interpretation of the predicate, although this effect is considerably delayed in the case of AAs. We conclude that for RAs, the target facilitation effect is driven by the lexical semantics of the predicate itself. However, it is argued that the extra processing cost observed with AAs results from pragmatic reasoning about imprecision.

Abstract. Sequences of multiple modifying adjectives are subject to poorly understood lexical ordering restrictions. There are certain commonalities to these restrictions across languages, as well as substantive language variation. Ordering restrictions in Spanish are still under empirical debate, with some proposing strict ordering for direct modifier adjectives; others proposing broad ordering restrictions based on the contrast between intersective and non-intersective adjectives, and yet others raising the possibility that adjectival order is fully unrestricted. The goal of the present study is to examine corpus evidence for adjectival sequences. We look at both sequences of two postnominal adjectives (Noun +Adjective + Adjective, NAA sequences) as well as sequences of one prenominal, and one postnominal adjective (Adjective + Noun +Adjective, ANA sequences). The results from the NAA datasets clearly categorically confirms that relational adjectives are structurally closer to the noun. There is some evidence for an ordering bias along the line of the intersectivity hypothesis, but little else in term of hard evidence for restrictions. Additional ordering constraints appear once we incorporate the ANA datasets into the empirical picture. One interpretation is that these restrictions can be subsumed under an approach where evaluative adjectives have to occupy the prenominal restriction. In sum, the evidence is most compatible with the middle ground approach, but not with a fully articulated set of ordering restrictions.

This article examines L2 performance in three areas of French morphosyntax by English L1 learners. More particularly, it examines how coindexation as defined within the government-binding framework develops in the L2 grammar. Empirical studies relating the development of two areas of French grammar by English L1 speakers are presented. L2 performance on information questions involving qui and que in which learners have to link the wh-phrase and its trace in order to establish the syntactic function of the wh-phrase in the sentence is examined, as well as performance on the morphological phenomenon of noun-adjective agreement in French where learners have to transmit agreement features from a noun to an adjective which it governs. In both cases, learners are found to increase gradually the structural domain in which they are able to operate as their level of competence in the L2 improves, suggesting that they are faced with a parsing problem when coindexing elements in a sentence. These findings are related to a study of the acquisition of restrictive relative clauses in French L2 by English learners (Hawkins, 1989), and then discussed in the light of the current debate in SLA research about the roles played by linguistic theory, on the one hand, and language processing mechanisms on the other.

Even though adnominal adjectives in Old English are distributionally versatile in that they may precede, follow or flank the noun they modify, their positioning is not random but follows from systematic interpretive contrasts between pre- and postnominal adjectives, such as ‘attribution vs predication’, ‘individual-level vs stage-level reading’ and ‘restrictive vs non-restrictive modification’. These contrasts are largely independent of adjectival inflection (pace Fischer 2000, 2001, 2006). The placement of adnominal adjectives in Old English is investigated in relation to recent comparative and theoretical studies on word order and word order variation (see Cinque 2007; Larson & Marušič 2004).

El propósito de la presente monografía es investigar si un grupo de hablantes no nativos de español, todos de nivel muy avanzado, usan los adjetivos modificadores en su discurso espontáneo de una manera parecida a la nativa, y más particularmente en qué medida los colocan de manera idiomática delante o detrás del substantivo. El material usado consiste, por un lado, de entrevistas, en las cuales los participantes cuentan de sus propias vidas, y por el otro lado, de una tarea en la que comentan la acción en un videoclip de la película Tiempos Modernos (de Charlie Chaplin). Los participantes del estudio son diez suecos que residen en Chile desde hace por lo menos 5 años. La hipótesis es que, dada una constatada tendencia conservadora general en los hablantes de una segunda lengua que los llevaría a “ir por lo seguro“, los sujetos sobreusarían la opción no marcada, o sea, la posposición, en la colocación de los adjetivos. Los adjetivos están categorizados en dos grupos: uno de adjetivos cotidianos que tienden a anteponerse al sustantivo (bueno, malo, pequeño, grande, pobre, puro, nuevo, viejo, alto), y los restantes adjetivos, que por defecto aparecen en posición posnominal (p.ej. laboral, sueco, libre, desnudo, rápido, cultural, blanco, redondo, privado etc.). Los resultados no apoyan la hipótesis, en el sentido de que los participantes no nativos tienden a sobreusar la posposición. Estos participantes son comparados con un grupo de control que consiste de diez hablantes de español L1 que residen en Chile. Un aspecto que discrepa en el grupo de hablantes no nativos es el uso del adjetivo grande, para el cual los no nativos prefieren la posposición. También destaca el hecho que los participantes nativos son más propensos a usar adjetivos en general en comparación con el grupo no nativo.<br>The purpose of this thesis is to investigate to what extent a group of non-native Spanish speakers, all of whom are highly proficient users of L2 Spanish, use modifying adjectives in spontaneous discourse in a targetlike manner and, particularly, to what extent they place them idiomatically before or after the noun. The corpus used consists of interviews, in which the subjects talk about their lives, and another task in which they comment the action of a videoclip from the movie ‘Modern Times’ (by Charlie Chaplin). The subjects of the study are ten Swedes that have lived in Chile for at least 5 years. The assumption being the tendency for second language speakers to be generally conservative and choose to ‘go for what's safe’, it is hypothesized that the L2 users would overuse the unmarked option for placing adjectives, namely after the noun. The adjectives are divided into two categories: one consisting of everyday adjectives that strongly tend to be placed ahead of the noun (bueno, malo, pequeño, grande, nuevo, pobre, puro, viejo, alto) and the other of adjectives that appear in postposition by default (e.g. laboral, sueco, libre, desnudo, rápido, cultural, blanco, redondo, privado etc.). The results don’t support the hypothesis, in the sense that the non-native participants tend to overuse postposition. The L2 participants have been compared to a control group consisting of ten L1 Spanish speakers living in Chile. One aspect that differs in the non-native group is the use of grande, for which the non-native speakers, unlike the natives, prefer postposition. What also stands out is the fact that native speakers are more prone to using adjectives in general compared to the non-native group.

According to the proposal made in Chapter 4, we use ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ to refer to a way of looking by quantifying over events. When we quantify it is very common for us to implicitly restrict the domain of things over which we do so. The author proposes that, as an instance of this general phenomenon, we employ implicit domain restriction when we use ‘grey’ to quantify over events in ‘The patch looks grey to you’. The author uses this to explain various phenomena to do with our use of ‘grey’ and other adjectives in ‘look’ sentences.

This chapter deals with the DP and its various layers. The lowest layer is the lexical domain, the NP. On top of the NP, there is a grammatical domain, calledsee Inflectional Phrase (IP), which contains the nominal inflectional categories of number and definiteness. The highest domain is the referential domain, the DP. The noun may be followed by complements and adjuncts, mainly in the form of PPs, and preceded by adjectives or quantifiers. Definiteness may be expressed as a preposed definite article or as a suffix on the noun. A non-modified noun moves to D, but an adjective blocks this movement and the definite article is spelt out as a separate word in D. There are several ways of expressing possession, especially in Norwegian, where the possessor can be either pre- or postnominal. In the other languages it is prenominal. Restrictive relative clauses are right-adjoined to IP, non-restrictive to DP. Universal quantifiers are generated above DP.

This essay calls into question the notion of labeling and how it relates to the general categorization of the Italian post-World War II immigrant to the United States. It examines through a semiotic lens the notion of Italian and how that adjective can be both restrictive as well as very broad in its adoption. This essay further proposes a new way to consider the “migrant” writer, be that person one who has left Italy for another country or who has arrived from another country in order to settle in Italy.

This chapter draws theoretical conclusions and outlines directions for future developments. It summarizes the key theoretical and philosophical upshots of the account developed in the book and discusses further extensions of this framework. It discusses how the account can be applied to model context-sensitivity of situated utterances, in a way that can offer insights into puzzles concerning disagreement in discourse and communication under ignorance, which have plagued standard accounts of context and content. Further, it outlines the way the account is to be extended and applied to various types of context-sensitive items, including relational expressions, gradable adjectives, and domain restriction.