Journal articles 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).

Adjective ordering in English, as in other languages, is nonrandom. In English, the restrictions involve left-to-right sequence, this being a specific case of the general principle: proximity of adjectives to the noun. This article provides a syntactic analysis of such restrictions, focusing not on the adjectives themselves but rather on properties of the nouns modified by them, namely their count/mass properties. Based on the claim that count and mass are hierarchically organized — rather than dichotomous, as previously thought — adjective ordering is shown to be a reflection of the count/mass distinction. This system accounts for the universality of the ordering restriction on adjectives, the universal principle being proximity to the noun. The difference in linear ordering in English and Spanish is ascribed to the presence/absence of a functional category, this being considered as a parameter. Non-canonically ordered adjectives in English are given a syntactic account as well, thus obviating the need for a pragmatic account.

Abstract This paper investigates the position of adjectives in noun phrases in Truku Seediq, proposing that the two documented positions correspond to different semantics as well as a difference in syntax. While post-nominal adjectives, corresponding to basic word-order in Truku Seediq, may be either restrictive or descriptive, pre-nominal adjectives, seen as an innovation, are semantically restrictive. This paper also argues for a difference in syntactic structure for both kinds of adjectives, restrictive adjectives heading their own projection while descriptive adjectives are bare adjectives standing in a closer relationship to the modified noun. This paper further identifies a syntactic constraint for pre-nominal adjectival placement that applies regardless of restrictivity of the modifier, namely the presence of a possessive clitic to the right of the modified noun. Data collection is achieved through both a traditional elicitation method and an experimental task-based method. Data are further digitalized in order to ensure systematic searchability. The data thus collected are apt to support semantic analysis as well as an investigation of age-group-related variation. It is claimed that language contact with Mandarin Chinese may be one of the triggering factors for the development of a pre-nominal position for modifying adjectives in Truku Seediq.

<p class="1"><span lang="X-NONE">This paper provides a scale-based semantics for resultatives in Japanese, Chinese and German, in an effort to arrive at: how adjectival complements and verbs in resultative constructions show sensitivity to the scalar structure. The findings reveal that Japanese accepts both open and closed-scale adjectives but disallows atelic verbs in resultatives. It appears that both telic and atelic verbs are welcome by Chinese resultatives. Adjectival complements in German resultatives are of no diverse distribution, i.e. both open and closed-scale APs are allowed to indicate a result in inherent resultatives and derived resultatives. </span><span lang="X-NONE">However, German verbs show sensitivity to the scalar property. The conclusion that one can draw here is that Japanese tends to be a </span><span lang="X-NONE">‘BECOME-focused’ language, with the encoding of resutlatives arriving at morph-syntactic level. </span><span lang="X-NONE">German, on the other hand, is likely to be a ‘BE AT-focused’ language. There is no restriction towards adjectives, but verbs show sensitivity to the scalar structure. Chinese is also a ‘BE AT-focused’ language, with resultatives mainly facilitated via syntax. Moreover, neither verbs nor adjectives are sensitive to the scalar structure. </span></p>

Abstract This article focuses on the interpretation of the adjectives that appear in Greek polydefinite DP s. It provides empirical support to the established position that restrictive modifiers are preferred in polydefinite environments (Kolliakou 1995). At the same time, it shows that non-restrictively modified polydefinites are not excluded by grammar (Manolessou 2000). To reconcile the facts, a novel syntactic analysis of polydefiniteness as involving modification by either restrictive or non-restrictive reduced relative clauses is formulated. We extend Alexopoulou’s (2006) analysis of resumption in full relatives to polydefinites and defend that what looks like a preadjectival definite article is a resumptive clitic pronoun that values the unvalued definiteness feature of a null relative complementizer. We further defend that, while the prenominal definite article is interpreted as d-linked, the resumptive clitic is a dependent expression that is interpreted as a referentially bound anaphora.

This study re-classifies Chinese monosyllabic adjectives and verbs in light of ‘scale structure’. It examines how various adjectives are associated with different scalar layers of verbs. The investigation focuses upon direct perception expressions and resultatives. The finding reveals that the closed-scale perceptual verb jiàn ‘see’ does not tolerate open-scale APs. This is because, (a) syntactically, Chinese perception verb complements do not represent a result state as the AP-complement is encoded into the perception verb root; (b) semantically, jiàn ‘see’ not only represent an accomplishment predication but contributes to a potential indirect perception, describing the observer’s evaluation of the perceived event.kàn ‘look’ is open-scale and is likely to render a direct perception report. The degree of kàn’s associations with different APs runs from ‘Totally open-scale AP’, down to ‘Upper closed-scale AP’, ‘Lower closed-scale AP’, ‘Totally closed-scale AP’. Resultatives seem to welcome all layers of adjectives. Various APs may match with a transitive verb, an unergative verb, a light verb or an unaccusative verb. This is down to the fact that, resultative complements are framed outside the verb roots and thus, do not receive restriction from the verb.

El uso de that y which en oraciones subordinadas adjetivas de carácter restrictivo en inglés ha sido definido, durante mucho tiempo, por los profesores de gramática y composición that y which son intercambiables en dichas oraciones. Sin embargo, algunos de los más connotados gramáticos y teóricos del idioma inglés afirman que that y which no deberían emplearse indistintamente. Expertos tales como W. H. Fowler, Theodore Bernstein y Fredrick Crews, en contraste con la práctica común para el uso de estas palabras, recomiendan que that sea empleado exclusivamente para oraciones restrictivas y which para oraciones no restrictivas. En este artículo se revisa, analiza y evalúa un debate que ha sido ignorado en libros de texto y de referencia empleados en la enseñanza del inglés.

Abstract The three most common strategies used to modify a head noun, namely through a possessive, an adjective and a relative clause construction feature in Siwi the use of the preposition n. Its presence is obligatory in the possessive constructions, but only present before an adjective or a relative clause in some contexts, depending on the level of restriction that the speaker wants to place on the head noun. The aim of the article is to describe the use and function of n in all three contexts of noun modification in Siwi and present supplementary data that helps the understanding of the global function of this preposition.

The position and meaning of Modern French adjectives is discussed in the generative syntax framework. The classical analysis of Cinque (1995), by N-raising to some functional position, is rejected for a number of reasons, notably its inability to account for changes in position since the Old French period. After a brief discussion of some typological and diachronic facts, two ‘semantic’ analyses are considered, those of Bouchard (1998) and Larson (1998). Based on Larson’s mapping model, the present study proposes an analysis of the position and meaning of adjectives in French in terms of movement of ‘restrictive’ and ‘evaluative’ adjectives to the pre-N position and the presence of logical operators of existence and genericity within DP. This analysis is supported by both semantic and syntactic facts: constraints on the determiner, as well as on modification, stress and coordination, defective semantic features.

Abstract In the conventional study of lexical semantics, adjectives are not considered likely to have a hierarchical relation, such as a meronymic (part-whole) relation, to each other. The most possible lexical relations among adjectives are antonymy and synonymy. In this study, however, I assume that meronomic relations between internal members of dimensional adjectives (e. g. big, long, deep) are conceptually possible from an ontological point of view. By using a semantic task, i. e. anaphora resolution, I draw the following conclusion: dimensional adjectives themselves have no meronymic relation to each other. However, restricting our discussion to the usage of Swedish dimensional adjectives in modifying concrete entities, the conceptual relations between the general term, e. g. BIG,1I use capital letters to indicate concepts throughout this essay. Lexical items are written in italics. and specific terms, e. g. LONG, DEEP, are mentally organized in a part-whole relation and thus in a meronomic structure. When applied to the whole expression which is a concept of a big entity, such as BIG CUP, there are meronomic relations between concepts of the big entity and its parts, e. g. BIG CUP – DEEP CUP.

The aim of this study is to describe and to classify the meaning of ?ing form in nominal group structure based on systemic functional linguistics perspective. To understand the meanings of ?ing form, it is necessary to know its function in the structure. The existence of ?ing form in nominal group structure can be functioning as Epithet, Classifier, Thing, and Qualifier. This study is done to describe and to classify the meaning of ?ing form functioning as Classifier. This study deserves doing since Classifier has wide range of semantic relations, and the broad meaning needs to be identified, and then to be described and classified based on the characteristics. The results find that the ?ing form describe status and process when it is represented by the word class of verb plus ?ing, then categorized as present participle functioning as verb, but when present participle functioning as adjective, the ?ing form describes restriction related to time and sequence; the ?ing form describes purpose and function, and scope when it is represented by the word class of noun plus ?ing, then categorized as verbal noun functioning as noun; the ?ing form describes restriction associated with science when it is represented by the word class of noun plus ?ing, then categorized as pseudo-participial adjective functioning as noun.

Abstract Resultative predicates have the aspectual effect of telicizing an atelic activity verb. The function of the postverbal constituent in accomplishments has been taken to be one of providing an end point to the activity, or of a constituent that "measures out" the event denoted by the activity verb. In either case, it delimits the event by providing it with boundaries. Looking at resultative predicates, we observe that they are subject to the requirement that they denote a bounded scale. This requirement is argued to be empirically superior to an alternative restriction stating that the resultative must be a stage-level predicate. The boundedness requirement furthermore provides direct evidence against an approach that treats the resultative as an end point, and supports the claim that it is an event measure. One piece of evidence concerns the 'make + NP+Adjective' construction, in which the adjective denotes the final stage or end point in a change of state, exactly as in the resultative construction. In contrast to the resultative, however, the adjective can be unbounded, as it is not an event measure in this case. We argue that the boundedness requirement on resultative predicates follows directly from treating it as an event measure, since a measure must be bounded as a matter of conceptual necessity.

An analysis of different as in every child watched a different movie is developed that is based on an analysis of indefinites in terms of Skolemised choice functions. The internal reading of the sentence, which expresses that the movies covary with the children, is analysed as stating that the children can be mapped injectively to movies they watched. This is achieved by letting the Skolemised choice function that interprets the indefinite pick, for each child, an element from the set of movies that the same function does not assign to any other individual, which allows for analysing different in a manner parallelling ordinary intersective adjectives. Simply replacing this set of movies with the set of contextually salient movies then also gives the external reading. An implementation at the syntax-semantics interface is provided, employing Lexical Resource Semantics.

ABSTRACTThis paper presents a study of young children's understanding of a constraint on English word order, which is that pronouns and proper names cannot be modified by prenominai adjectives. For adults, this is a syntactic constraint: adjectives can only precede nouns, and pronouns and proper names are lexical Noun Phrases (NPs). In two analyses, the spontaneous speech of 14 one- and two-year-old children was studied. These analyses show that even in children's very first word combinations, they almost never say things like big Fred or big he. Some non-syntactic theories of this phenomenon are discussed and found to have serious descriptive problems, supporting the claim that children understand knowledge of word order through rules that order abstract linguistic categories. A theory is proposed as to how children could use semantic information to draw the noun/NP distinction and to acquire this restriction on English word order.

dominant kinds of errors and the cause of errors made by the first grade of MA Integral Hidayatullah Makbusun. The data were taken from the erroneous adjective clauses “who and whom” in present continues tense . The test was given by the researcher to the students at MA Integral Hidayatullah Makbusun in the first grade that consists of fifteen students. In analyzing the data, the writer took the result of student test as technique of collecting data. The writer calculated the frequency of errors for each kind and also counted the percentages of errors in the form of table to determine the dominant kind of errors. Finally, the researcher analyzed the cause of errors. After analyzing the data, the researcher found 56% in used who and 69% in used whom. The researcher found kinds of errors There are addition (20 errors or 11.76 %), ommision (44 errors or 25.88 %), subtitution (69 errors or 40.59 %) and ordering (37 error or 21.76%). Therefore, the subtitution error has the highest frequency (69 errors or 40.59%). It proved that the students do not understand the pattern and function of adjective clauses “who and whom” sentence since they often ignore to put an item needed in the well-formed adjective clause sentence. In this research, the writer found that those errors are caused the cause by three types, that is first language interference, overgeneralization, and ignorance of rule restriction. And factors cause of error are interlangual transfer and intralingual transfer. Interlangual transfer is the errors caused by the mother tongue influence. While, intralingual transfer is the error caused by the target language influence.

Complex collocations are a type of collocation whose syntactic structure is more complex than that of simple collocations. Thus, they are binary standardized or frequent phrases whose components show a lexical restriction relationship. The complex character of its structure means that one of its components, the collocative, is not a lexical unit, but rather a fixed phrase. Most of them are adverbial, either in the case of verbal predicates (llover a cántaros) or adjectival predicates (loco de atar), although they can also — in less frequent cases — be adjectival, as when combined with a noun (dinero en efectivo), or also nominal, in combination with a verb (hacer un corte de mangas).

In this paper I explore the elements that make up the German distributive universal quantifier jeder, and the structural relationships among them. I argue that jeder consists of three overt morphemes je-d-er, which are heads in an extended adjectival projection (xAP). Their relative order is derived by movement [ xAP je d er t jeP]. Je corresponds to the adjectival stem, -d- is an adjectival article (which in turn is analyzed as a relative complementizer) and -er is an agreement head, AgrA. The xAP further contains movement traces/ copies of the nominal which jeder quantifies over. One of these copies is in the complement of je where, I claim, it supplies the restriction (distributive key or range). The components of the proposal are all motivated independently of jeder: (i) the morphology of jeder identifies it as adjectival, hence an analysis of it must incorporate an (independently motivated) adjectival syntax; (ii) a comparison with the distributive dual quantifier beid- ‘both’ further informs the syntactic analysis internal to the word jeder; and (iii) a comparison of je in jeder and in other je-words suggests that je takes an N(P) complement, a fact that confirms the expectations regarding the selectional properties of je raised by the preceding discussion. Finally, a comparison of jeder with counterparts of it in other languages, as well as with other complex determiners in German, will broaden the scope and corroborate important aspects of the present proposal.

Abstract The present study investigates the phonology and phonetics of Galician post-vocalic velar nasals. Galician has very strict coda restrictions – it does not allow for complex codas. One exception to this restriction is found in the plurals of words ending in a nasal consonant, which add /s/ to the “right” of a noun or adjective: man ‘hand’, mans ‘hands’; pan ‘bread’, pans ‘breads’. The present study puts forward a proposal, initially based on synchronic, formal phonological grounds, according to which post-vocalic, pre-/s/ nasals in plural forms are not nasal stops, but nasal glides. Their nature as nasal glides allows for their syllabification in the nucleus rather than in the coda, thus preserving (i.e., not violating) the restriction on complex codas. This proposal is then tested with a production experiment based on quantitative acoustic data. The acoustic study reveals indeed a difference in the degree of weakening of post-vocalic nasals, with pre-/s/ nasals in the plural forms showing a significantly higher degree of weakening than pre-/s/ nasals in the singular forms. The article concludes with an Optimality-Theoretic analysis of the phonological facts.

This study offers new insights into how the cognitive–semantic analysis of adjectival deontic modality in the mediatised ‘fatwa’ register can be methodologically enhanced at both quantitative and qualitative levels. Drawing on the force-dynamics model originated by Talmy (1981 , 1988 ) and developed by Sweetser (1990) , the adjectivally modal expressions of obligation and permission have been investigated in an electronic corpus of fatwas (353,293 words in 1,440 texts). The research data is manipulated by the Wmatrix ( Rayson, 2003 ) corpus tool with a view to calculating the relevant modal keywords and generating their concordances; further, the interactive register analysis of the tenor in the fatwa discourse is provided in a way that ( i) facilitates the concordance reading of the adjectival keywords of deontic modality, and ( ii) examines the force dynamics underlying these adjectival keywords in terms of their modally interactive meanings. The study has reached three main findings. First, in the specialised corpus of electronic fatwas there are five keywords of adjectival deontic modality: obligatory, obliged, permissible, impermissible and forbidden. Second, the force dynamics of obligatory, obliged and permissible reveals enacting positive-compulsion with attitudinal variations of objective and subjective meanings towards real-world content (themes) and participants (questioner and questionee) in the mediatised register of the fatwa. Third, complementary to the second, the force dynamics of impermissible and forbidden reveals a set of debarring negative-restriction barriers of various forms, namely personal, collective, generic and topical, in the same fatwa register.

Attributive superlative adjectives are famously ambiguous between readings in which they compare elements of the description they modify, and readings in which they compare competitors to some description-external element of the sentence. The literature is braided with two analytical origin stories for these different interpretations. One strand of analysis attributes the difference in meaning to a difference in the compositional scope of the superlative morpheme. The other attributes the difference to a difference in how the superlative's implicit domain of quantification is resolved. Here, I present new data showing that pronouns in superlative descriptions have sloppy readings, akin to familiar cases of adverbial association with focus, and I argue that these readings are compatible with scope-taking analyses, but cannot be generated by any plausible variety of domain restriction.

AbstractThis article provides an analysis of participial constructions in English, within the feature-checking approach to inflectional morphology. It argues for a unified treatment of the perfect, passive and adjectival uses of the past participle, involving a monosemous inflectional head checking a monosemous affix. There are two classes of constructions with -ing, each of which is given a unified treatment. The analysis requires the assumption that head-adjoined structures can be generated directly, rather than arising only as a result of movement. It also demonstrates that inflectional and derivational affixation are inherently different processes. An affix may in principle be attached by either process, with each process resulting in a different output structure. With these two provisos, it is possible to maintain both Johns’ (1992) One Form/One Meaning Principle and the more restrictive Strong Monosemy Principle proposed here.

The research focuses on the variations in the degrees of equivalence manifested in English and Ukrainian constructions referring to blind people. In this study, patterns consisting of two or more words referring to people with decreasing ability to see, all forms sight impairment are termed blindness-constructions. The results show that in translating from English into Ukrainian blindness-constructions reveal varying degrees of equivalence: from exact correspondence in case of immediate constructions to some sort of constructional mismatch in extended patterns. High degree of equivalence with the immediate blindness-constructions is explained by their fixed form: they include combinations of words with the nouns impairment, sight / vision and the adjective blind describing stable attributes without reference to any specific situation. The modified English blindness-constructions rarely have equivalents readily available in Ukrainian, since their modifying elements broaden or narrow the meaning of immediate constructions restricting their usage to particular contexts in source and target languages. The extended blindness-constructions exhibit a mismatch across the languages. These constructions are made up of two immediate or modified ones and represent the generalized models of situations where translators, forced by the non-existence of identical patterns, have to resort to various strategies.

The immediate answer to the question posed in the title is given with characteristic dry clarity by James Murray in that great work of English history the Oxford English Dictionary. Murray's first definition is “English Saxon, Saxon of England: orig. a collective name for the Saxons of Britain as distinct from the ‘Old Saxons’ of the continent. Hence, properly applied to the Saxons (or Wessex, Essex, Middlesex, Sussex, and perhaps Kent), as distinct from the Angles.” After explaining that, “in this Dictionary, the language of England before 1100 is called, as a whole, ‘Old English,’”Murray then goes on to say that the adjective “Anglo-Saxon” is “extended to the entire Old English people and language before the Norman Conquest.” Neither he nor the Supplement mentions explicitly the almost purely chronological use of “Anglo-Saxon” to describe the whole period of English history between 400 and 1066 that is now current, but it is easy to see how this has derived from the usage they expound.What the original edition goes on to do, moreover, is to give an account of a wider use of the word that beautifully encapsulates the beliefs about culture and descent that lie behind it. The expression “Anglo-Saxon,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was then—that is, in the late nineteenth century—used “rhetorically for English in its wider or ethnological sense, in order to avoid the later historical restriction of ‘English’ as distinct from Scotch, or the modern political restriction of ‘English’ as opposed to American of the United States; thus applied to (1) all persons of Teutonic descent (or who reckon themselves such) in Britain, whether of English, Scotch, or Irish birth; (2) all of this descent in the world, whether subjects of Great Britain or of the United States.”

This research is aimed at describing the grammatical errors made by the students in translating Indonesian into English. Four objectives are fromulated: 1.To find out the types of errors that the students make in translating sentences from Indonesian into English 2.To find out the most frequent errors made by the students of UKI Toraja 3.To find out the source of error that the students make in translating Indonesian text into English text and 4. To find out the differences in number of grammatical errors made the students of different levels of UKI Toraja. The method used was a descriptive method. The population of this research was the fourth-semester and the sixth-semester students of UKI Toraja in the academic year 2014/2015. The fourth-semester students consisted of 270 as the population in this research. Thirty (30) students were taken as the sample. The sixth-semester students also consisted of 270 students as a population in this research and30 students were taken as the sample. The research findings reveal that the most frequent errors in both levels are errors in verbs; and that most of the errors are due to overgeneralization and the ignorance of the rule restriction. Keywords: Grammatical errors, Indonesian text, English text, Verb, Noun, Conjunction, Pronoun, Adjective, Adverb, Article, Preposition.

AbstractThis article presents empirical evidence of the high referential specificity of sound-symbolic words, based on a FrameNet-aided analysis of collocational data of Japanese mimetics. The definition of mimetics, particularly their semantic definition, has been crosslinguistically the most challenging problem in the literature, and different researchers have used different adjectives (most notably, “vivid,” since Doke 1935) to describe their semantic peculiarity. The present study approaches this longstanding issue from a frame-semantic point of view combined with a quantitative method. It was found that mimetic manner adverbials generally form a frame-semantically restricted range of verbal/nominal collocations than non-mimetic ones. Each mimetic can thus be considered to evoke a highly specific frame, which elaborates the general frame evoked by its typical host predicate and contains a highly limited set of frame elements, which correlate and constrain one another. This conclusion serves as a unified account of previously reported phenomena concerning mimetics, including the lack of hyponymy, the one-mimetic-per-clause restriction, and unparaphrasability. This study can be also viewed as a methodological proposal for the measurement of frame specificity, which supplements bottom-up linguistic tests.

Currently, some simulative accounts exist within dynamic or evolutionary frameworks that are concerned with the development of linguistic categories within a population of language users. Although these studies mostly emphasize that their models are abstract, the paradigm categorization domain is preferably that of colors. In this paper, the authors argue that color adjectives are special predicates in both linguistic and metaphysical terms: semantically, they are intersective predicates, metaphysically, color properties can be empirically reduced onto purely physical properties. The restriction of categorization simulations to the color paradigm systematically leads to ignoring two ubiquitous features of natural language predicates, namely relativity and context-dependency. Therefore, the models for simulation models of linguistic categories are not able to capture the formation of categories like perspective-dependent predicates ‘left’ and ‘right’, subsective predicates like ‘small’ and ‘big’, or predicates that make reference to abstract objects like ‘I prefer this kind of situation’. The authors develop a three-dimensional grid of ascending complexity that is partitioned according to the semiotic triangle. They also develop a conceptual model in the form of a decision grid by means of which the complexity level of simulation models of linguistic categorization can be assessed in linguistic terms.

In this work, I provide an analysis of adjectival depictive constructions which accounts for most of their fundamental properties. First, I focus on the restrictions having to do with the integration of the depictive and the verbal predicate: they are based on aspectual compatibility between the two predicates, which, in turn, will depend on the ability, on the part of the depictive, to make reference to some (sub)event in the event structure of the verbal predicate. Facts not captured by previous approaches in the literature will be straightforwardly accounted for, among them the possibility to have I-L depictive constructions, and the impossibility to combine a depictive with some non-stative verbal predicates. Second, it will be shown that the informational import of the depictive in the sentence can be equivalent to that of the verbal predicate: both can be the primary lexical basis of predication. This is reflected in the sentence in various ways, having to do with aspectual modifiers, and in the properties of the sentential subject. In this connection, we will reconsider the notion of subject, arguing that no subject-predicate relation takes place in the lexical domain of sentences, and hence that the argument the depictive is oriented to, the common argument, cannot be a subject of the depictive. Finally, a minimalist analysis is proposed for the syntax of the construction, in terms of direct syntactic merge of predicative constituents and sidewards (q-to-q) movement for the common argument, from the lexical domain of the depictive to the lexical domain of the verb. As to morphosyntactic properties, a syntactic Double Agree relation is assumed to hold between T/v, as probes, on the one hand, and the common argument and depictive, as simultaneous goals, on the other, which would allow for the deletion of Case features on both goals. The assumed presence of Structural Case on the adjectival depictive will be responsible for the well-known restriction on the orientation of depictives to the sentential subject or object.

This article is devoted to a semantico-syntactic analysis of the use of seven markers of negation in Early Archaic Chinese, especially in the Zhou bronze inscriptions. The negative BU 不 which is used with intransitive verbal predicates or with adjectives, establishes a descriptive relationship between the subject and the predicate in its clause; it only shows a simple descriptive intention and takes an integral part in the presupposition. The negative marker FU 弗 is fully adverbial and is used, essentially, with transitive verbs. The marker FEI 非, establishes an attributive, descriptive relationship between the two terms of the predication inside the clause just as does BU; but it introduces a polemic value in expressing the falsity of a presupposition. The marker WU2 毋, in contrast with WU1 勿, does not come under the category of a deontic modality. The obligation which it shows does not come from the speaker (or from any other source) but is internal to the subject-predicate relationship. The negation in this case is to be taken as a statement of fact and not as an injunction. However, according to the observations here, WU2 毋 refers to the epistemic modal category. That why it can express the double value of both "certainty" and “necessity” according to the context. The negative WANG 勿 (the negative counterpart of YOU 有 "existence" or "possession") is used to express the possession of dependence. In addition, because of its existential value, it allows for presenting certain terms in both a restrictive and an extensive sense. Finally WU3 無 is most often attached to a substantive and forms thus a marginal expansion (in a syntactically dependent position) serving to characterize a nominal phrase, a verbal phrase, or an entire clause.

This study aims to find out types of error in using gerunds, the most dominant error and the causes of error made by the students of the sixth semester of English Department FKIP UNIB 2016/2017 in using gerunds. The title of this paper is “The Study of English Department Students’ Errors in Using Gerunds (A Case Study at the Students of the Sixth Semester of English Department FKIP UNIB 2016/2017). In term of research methodology, the researcher used both quantitative and qualitative method in analyzing the data. The technique of collecting the data in this research was a composed test. The subject of this study was 79 students in the sixth semester of English Department FKIP UNIB 2016/2017. The result of this research showed that the students of the sixth semester of English Department FKIP UNIB 2016/2017 made errors in using eight types of gerunds. They were gerund as object of preposition, gerund as subject of a sentence, gerund as direct object of certain verbs, gerund as the complement of a sentence, gerund after special expressions, gerund as passive form, gerund as possessive and gerund used in the negative adjective ‘no’. The most dominant error made by the students of the sixth semester of English Department FKIP UNIB 2016/2017 in using gerunds was gerund as direct object of certain verbs. In this research, the researcher found three causes of error in using gerunds. They were overgeneralization, ignorance of rule instructions and incomplete application of rules. Ignorance of rule instructions became the dominant cause in this research. The errors made by the students in using eight types of gerunds were caused by ignorance of rule restriction because the students did not master the rule in grammar especially in learning gerunds

Article deals with the changes of the meanings of the post nominal adjectives in the process of transformation in the modern English language. On the basis of the linguoculturological approach and the method of linguistic analysis, the characteristic features of the change in the meanings of post-nominative adjectives in the English language have been revealed. In the English language the adjectives can perform the function of predicative. For the semantics of the adjectives which have the predicative function, these adjectives are characterized by inner qualitative diversity. Mainly, qualitative adjectives refer to classical predication and denote the feature of the object directly. Such adjectives have more features of predication. The predicative sign of the adjective, the presence of a connotation of subjective assessment determines its semantics and use. There are differences between the constructions used in the predicate function in phrases that perform the function of the subject and in the altered form of word phrases related attributively and predicatively. The predicative relation is the immunest form of syntactic connection and in predicative connectives the structural restriction in comparison with attributive constructions is extremely limited. Adjectives as predicative words do not have denotation and reference, they have no denoter, there is a signification. Basing on their indicative characteristics, it is possible to present all the possible semantic features. For the English language it is characteristic the use of the attribute before the defined word. The development from a special sign of thought to a general concept is characteristic for the whole structure of the English language; it is even possible to observe it in word formation. In most cases, taking into account the use of the adjective in the function of an attribute, the terms like postpositional (post nominal) and prepositional (prenominal) adjectives are used. The reasons for the change in the position of adjectives should be sought not always in the nature of the adjective, but in the degree to which it determines its referent. The semes that make up the meaning of the word are at different levels and are more or less stable. In adjectives, the nuclear seme, or subseme, is always found next to the differential seme. In other words, the adjective cannot be combined with nouns in all semantic groups. When an adjective is combined with a noun, a background is formed that allows or prevents the actualization of a particular seme. This causes the activation of a specific seme associated with the semantics of the given name in combination with the given name. Such semes are reflected in the join semantics. The opposite can also be said. The adjective itself chooses the noun for word formation. After all, the same adjective behaves differently in relation to transformation into different attributive complexes. In our opinion, adjectives act as an important restrictive informative element at the content level.

Abstract Teaching vocabulary for young learners by giving it into semantic set will not help them understand how the words are used. In elementary coursebook, the vocabulary is presented in list semantic set that is semantically related items such as jobs doctor, teacher, lawyer etc. or colours: red, blue, yellow etc.). This idea is really restrictive to develop the students’ vocabulary mastery. It seems that teaching vocabulary in semantically related items is counter-productive but this idea has never been taken on board. The question is Why do students have to go through so much learning of things which they are hardly ever likely to say?. (Estatiev, 2015) and (Leoselivan, 2014) introduce the way to teach students’ vocabulary by developing the students’ idea through communicative purpose beyond the basic description. Developing alternatives in horizontal lists instead of semantic set lists will make learners find the words in which they are likely to go with (co-text) rather than with other words sharing the same superordinate concept. The easy samples are colour and animal. Focusing them in three at a time and present would be more affective to fix the word collocation such as noun that can go along with adjective or noun collocation. Keyword: EFL, Semantic Set, Teaching Lexically, Vocabulary Mastery

The current research investigates the use of collocations in students’ academic writings to obtain information about the popular types of collocations they use, the collocational errors, and the sources of errors. The design of the study is a qualitative research which employed document analysis as the instrument to collect data. 50 students were the population and the samples as well. The results show that students have a tendency of using Type 1 (Verb-Noun) and Type 2 (Adjective-Noun) collocations more than the other types. With regard to the collocational errors, it is noted that Type 1 and Type 2 are also the top types in which students make mistakes. Additionally, verbs and adjectives are the main parts that students mostly have problems with. On examining the sources of errors, the researcher found five causes including approximation, the ignorance of rule restriction, negative transfer, the use of synonyms, and false concept hypothesized. Among these error sources, negative transfer is the most important factor leading to students’ collocational errors.

The verbal prefix out- in its scalar-comparative sense is among the most productive English locative prefixes. Although several authors make use of the construction as a test environment for verb classification, few studies have looked at its semantics in any depth. Moreover, previous work on this prefix relies on fairly small databases or self-generated data, and no reliable corpus-based investigations are available, calling into question the usefulness of present semantic analyses and the application of the construction as a test environment. This study aims at remedying these shortcomings via presenting a database culled mostly from COCA and iWeb. Based on the analysis of the wide range of attestations in the database it is shown that existing generalizations and previous semantic analyses are wrong and that particular restrictions proposed in the literature are not borne out by the data. Several claims, including core features of the formalizations offered in the literature, have to be discarded. Furthermore, alleged base-restrictions on the input out- allows are shown to be far too restrictive. This holds for verbal as well as adjectival and nominal bases. It is shown that approaches that deny the existence of category-changing prefixes are misguided. Overall, the construction is more flexible regarding possible interpretations and more promiscuous with respect to possible bases than previously thought. At the same time, the system is not unrestricted. Generalizing over the data, this article lays out the requirements and specific challenges any full formal account of out- will have to match.

Rating scales are widely used to rate working dog behavior and performance. Whilst behaviour scales have been extensively validated, instruments used to rate ability have usually been designed by training and practitioner organizations, and often little consideration has been given to how seemingly insignificant aspects of the scale design might alter the validity of the results obtained. Here we illustrate how manipulating one aspect of rating scale design, the provision of verbal benchmarks or labels (as opposed to just a numerical scale), can affect the ability of observers to distinguish between differing levels of search dog performance in an operational environment. Previous studies have found evidence for range restriction (using only part of the scale) in raters' use of the scales and variability between raters in their understanding of the traits used to measures performance. As provision of verbal benchmarks has been shown to help raters in a variety of disciplines to select appropriate scale categories (or scores), it may be predicted that inclusion of verbal benchmarks will bring raters' conceptualization of the traits closer together, increasing agreement between raters, as well as improving the ability of observers to distinguish between differing levels of search dog performance and reduce range restriction. To test the value of verbal benchmarking we compared inter-rater reliability, raters' ability to discriminate between different levels of search dog performance, and their use of the whole scale before and after being presented with benchmarked scales for the same traits. Raters scored the performance of two separate types of explosives search dog (High Assurance Search (HAS) and Vehicle Search (VS) dogs), from short (~30 s) video clips, using 11 previously validated traits. Taking each trait in turn, for the first five clips raters were asked to give a score from 1, representing the lowest amount of the trait evident to 5, representing the highest. Raters were given a list of adjective-based benchmarks (e.g., very low, low, intermediate, high, very high) and scored a further five clips for each trait. For certain traits, the reliability of scoring improved when benchmarks were provided (e.g., Motivation and Independence), indicating that their inclusion may potentially reduce ambivalence in scoring, ambiguity of meanings, and cognitive difficulty for raters. However, this effect was not universal, with the ratings of some traits remaining unchanged (e.g., Control), or even reducing in reliability (e.g., Distraction). There were also some differences between VS and HAS (e.g., Confidence reliability increased for VS raters and decreased for HAS raters). There were few improvements in the spread of scores across the range, but some indication of more favorable scoring. This was a small study of operational handlers and trainers utilizing training video footage from realistic operational environments, and there are potential cofounding effects. We discuss possible causal factors, including issues specific to raters and possible deficiencies in the chosen benchmarks, and suggest ways to further improve the effectiveness of rating scales. This study illustrates why it is vitally important to validate all aspects of rating scale design, even if they may seem inconsequential, as relatively small changes to the amount and type of information provided to raters can have both positive and negative impacts on the data obtained.

The usual postmodern suspicions about diligently deciphering authorial intent or stridently seeking fixed meaning/s and/or binary distinctions in an artistic work aside, this self-indulgent essay pushes the boundaries regarding normative academic research, for it focusses on my own (minimally celebrated) published creative writing’s status as a literary innovation. Dedicated to illuminating some of the less common denominators at play in Australian horror, my paper recalls the creative writing process involved when I set upon the (arrogant?) goal of creating a new genre of creative writing: that of the ‘Aboriginal Fantastic’. I compare my work to the literary output of a small but significant group (2.5% of the population), of which I am a member: Aboriginal Australians. I narrow my focus even further by examining that creative writing known as Aboriginal horror. And I reduce the sample size of my study to an exceptionally small number by restricting my view to one type of Aboriginal horror literature only: the Aboriginal vampire novel, a genre to which I have contributed professionally with the 2011 paperback and 2012 e-book publication of That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! However, as this paper hopefully demonstrates, and despite what may be interpreted by some cynical commentators as the faux sincerity of my taxonomic fervour, Aboriginal horror is a genre noteworthy for its instability and worthy of further academic interrogation.Surprising to many, Aboriginal Australian mythology includes at least one truly vampire-like entity, despite Althans’ confident assertion that the Bunyip is “Australia’s only monster” (16) which followed McKee’s equally fearless claim that “there is no blackfella tradition of zombies or vampires” (201). Gelder’s Ghost Stories anthology also only mentions the Bunyip, in a tale narrated by Indigenous man Percy Mumbulla (250). Certainly, neither of these academics claim Indigeneity in their ethnicity and most Aboriginal Australian scholars will happily agree that our heterogeneous Indigenous cultures and traditions are devoid of opera-cape wearing Counts who sleep in coffins or are repelled by crucifix-wielding Catholics. Nevertheless, there are fascinating stories--handed down orally from one generation to the next (Australian Aborigines, of course, have no ancestral writing system)--informing wide-eyed youngsters of bloodsucking, supernatural entities that return from the grave to feed upon still living blackfellas: hence Unaipon describes the red-skinned, fig tree-dwelling monster, the “Yara Ma Yha Who […] which sucks the blood from the victim and leaves him helpless upon the ground” (218). Like most vampires, this monster imparts a similarly monstrous existence upon his prey, which it drains of blood through the suckers on its fingers, not its teeth. Additionally, Reed warns: “Little children, beware of the Yara-ma-yha-who! If you do not behave yourselves and do as you are told, they will come and eat you!” (410), but no-one suggests this horrible creature is actually an undead human.For the purposes of this paper at least, the defining characteristics of a vampire are firstly that it must have once been an ordinary, living human. Secondly, it must have an appetite for human blood. Thirdly, it must have a ghoulish inability to undergo a permanent death (note, zombies, unlike vampires it seems, are fonder of brains than fresh hemoglobin and are particularly easy to dispatch). Thus, according to my criteria, an arguably genuine Aboriginal Australian vampire is referred to when Bunson writes of the Mrart being an improperly buried member of the tribe who has returned after death to feed upon the living (13) and when Cheung notes “a number of vampire-like creatures were feared, most especially the mrart, the ghost of a dead person who attacked victims at night and dragged them away from campsites” (40). Unfortunately, details regarding this “number of vampire-like creatures” have not been collated, nor I fear, in this era of rapidly extinguishing Aboriginal Australian language use, are they ever likely to be.Perhaps the best hope for preservation of these little known treasures of our mythology lies not with anthropologists but with the nation’s Indigenous creative writers. Yet no blackfella novelist, apparently, has been interested in the monstrous, bloodsucking, Aboriginal Undead. Despite being described as dominating the “Black Australian novel” (Shoemaker 1), writer Mudrooroo--who has authored three vampire novels--reveals nothing of Aboriginal Australian vampirology in his texts. Significantly, however, Mudrooroo states that Aboriginal Australian novelists such as he “are devoting their words to the Indigenous existential being” (Indigenous 3). Existentiality, of course, has to do with questions of life, death and dying and, for we Aboriginal Australians, such questions inevitably lead to us addressing the terrible consequences of British invasion and genocide upon our cultural identity, and this is reflected in Mudrooroo’s effective use of the vampire trope in his three ‘Ghost Dreaming’ novels, as they are also known. Mudrooroo’s bloodsuckers, however, are the invading British and Europeans in his extended ‘white man as ghost’ metaphor: they are not sourced from Aboriginal Australian mythology.Mudrooroo does, notably, intertwine his story of colonising vampires in Australia with characters created by Bram Stoker in his classic novel Dracula (1897). He calls his first Aborigine to become a familiar “Renfield” (Undying 93), and even includes a soft-porn re-imagining of an encounter between characters he has inter-textually named “Lucy” and “Mina” (Promised 3). This potential for a contemporary transplantation of Stoker’s European characters to Australia was another aspect I sought to explore in my novel, especially regarding semi-autobiographical writing by mixed-race Aboriginal Australians such as Mudrooroo and myself. I wanted to meta-fictionally insert my self-styled anti-hero into a Stoker-inspired milieu. Thus my work features a protagonist who is confused and occasionally ambivalent about his Aboriginal identity. Brought up as Catholic, as I was, he succumbs to an Australian re-incarnation of Stoker’s Dracula as Anti-Christ and finds himself battling the true-believers of the Catholic Church, including a Moroccan version of Professor Van Helsing and a Buffy-like, quasi-Islamic vampire slayer.Despite his once revered status, Mudrooroo is now exiled from the Australian literary scene as a result of his claim to Indigeneity being (apparently) disproven (see Clark). Illness and old age prevent him from defending the charges, hence it is unlikely that Mudrooroo (or Colin Johnson as he was formerly known) will further develop the Aboriginal Australian vampire trope in his writing. Which situation leaves me to cautiously identify myself as the sole Aboriginal Australian novelist exploring Indigenous vampires in his/her creative writing, as evidenced by my 312 page novel That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance!, which was a prescribed text in a 2014 Indiana University course on World Literature (Halloran).Set in a contemporary Australia where disparate existential explanations including the Aboriginal Dreamtime, Catholicism, vampirism and atheism all co-exist, the writing of my novel was motivated by the question: ‘How can such incongruent ideologies be reconciled or bridged?’ My personal worldview is influenced by all four of these explanations for the mysteries of life and death: I was brought up in Catholicism but schooled in scientific methodology, which evolved into an insipid atheism. Culturally I was drawn to the gothic novel and developed an intellectual interest in Stoker’sDracula and its significance as a pro-Catholic, covert mission of proselytization (see Starrs 2004), whilst simultaneously learning more of my totem, Garrawi (the Sulphur-crested White Cockatoo), and the Aboriginal Dreamtime legends of my ancestral forebears. Much of my novel concerns questions of identity for a relatively light-complexioned, mixed ancestry Aboriginal Australian such as myself, and the place such individuals occupy in the post-colonial world. Mudrooroo, perhaps, was right in surmising that we Aboriginal Australian authors are devoted to writing about “the Indigenous existential being” for my Aboriginal vampire novel is at least semi-autobiographical and fixated on the protagonist’s attempts to reconcile his atheism with his Dreamtime teachings and Catholicism. But Mudrooroo’s writing differs markedly from my own when it comes to the expectations he has regarding the audience’s acceptance of supernatural themes. He apparently fully believed in the possibility of such unearthly spirits existing, and wrote of the “Maban Reality” whereby supernatural events are entirely tenable in the Aboriginal Australian world-view, and the way these matters are presented suggests he expects the reader to be similarly convinced. With this Zeitgeist, Mudrooroo’s ‘Ghost Dreaming’ novels can be accurately described as Aboriginal Gothic. In this genre, Chanady explains, “the supernatural, as well as highly improbable events, are presented without any comment by the magical realist narrator” ("Magic Realism" 431).What, then, is the meaning of Aboriginal Gothic, given we Aboriginal peoples have no haunted castles or mist-shrouded graveyards? Again according to Chanady, as she set out in her groundbreaking monograph of 1985, in a work of Magical Realism the author unquestioningly accepts the supernatural as credible (10-12), even as, according to Althans, it combines “the magical and realist, into a new perspective of the world, thus offering alternative ways and new approaches to reality” (26). From this general categorisation, Althans proposes, comes the specific genre of Aboriginal Gothic, which is Magical Realism in an Indigenous context that creates a “cultural matrix foreign to a European audience [...] through blending the Gothic mode in its European tradition with the myths and customs of Aboriginal culture” (28-29). She relates the Aboriginal Gothic to Mudrooroo’s Maban Reality due to its acting “as counter-reality, grounded in the earth or country, to a rational worldview and the demands of a European realism” (28). Within this category sit not only the works of Aboriginal Australian novelists such as Mudrooroo, but also more recent novels by Aboriginal Australian writers Kim Scott and Alexis Wright, who occasionally indulge in improbable narratives informed by supernatural beings (while steering disappointingly clear of vampires).But there is more to the Aboriginal Gothic than a naïve acceptance of Maban Reality, or, for that matter, any other Magical Realist treatments of Aboriginal Australian mythology. Typically, the work of Aboriginal Gothic writers speaks to the historical horrors of colonisation. In contrast to the usually white-authored Australian Gothic, in which the land down under was seen as terrifying by the awestruck colonisers, and the Aborigine was portrayed as “more frightening than any European demon” (Turcotte, "Australian Gothic" 10), the Aboriginal Gothic sometimes reverses roles and makes the invading white man the monster. The Australian Gothic was for Aborigines, “a disabling, rather than enabling, discourse” (Turcotte, "Australian Gothic" 10) whilst colonial Gothic texts egregiously portrayed the colonised subject as a fearsome and savage Other. Ostensibly sub-human, from a psychoanalytic point of view, the Aborigine may even have symbolised the dark side of the British settler, but who, in the very act of his being subjugated, assures the white invader of his racial superiority, moral integrity and righteous identity. However, when Aboriginal Australian authors reiterate, when we subjugated savages wrestle the keyboard away, readers witness the Other writing back, critically. Receivers of our words see the distorted and silencing master discourse subverted and, indeed, inverted. Our audiences are subjectively repositioned to see the British Crown as the monster. The previously presumed civil coloniser is instead depicted as the author and perpetrator of a violently racist, criminal discourse, until, eventually, s/he is ultimately ‘Gothicised’: eroded and made into the Other, the villainous, predatory savage. In this style of vicious literary retaliation Mudrooroo excelled. Furthermore, as a mixed ancestry Aborigine, like myself, Mudrooroo represented in his very existence, the personification of Aboriginal Gothic, for as Idilko Riendes writes, “The half caste is reminiscent of the Gothic monstrous, as the half caste is something that seems unnatural at first, evoking fears” (107). Perhaps therein lies a source of the vehemency with which some commentators have pilloried Mudrooroo after the somewhat unconvincing evidence of his non-Indigeneity? But I digress from my goal of explicating the meaning of the term Aboriginal Gothic.The boundaries of any genre are slippery and one of the features of postmodern literature is its deliberate blurring of boundaries, hence defining genres is not easy. Perhaps the Gothic can be better understood when the meaning of its polar opposite, the Fantastic, is better understood. Ethnic authorial controversies aside and returning to the equally shady subject of authorial intent, in contrast to the Aboriginal Gothic of novelists Mudrooroo, Scott and Wright, and their accepting of the supernatural as plausible, the Fantastic in literature is characterised by an enlightened rationality in which the supernatural is introduced but ultimately rejected by the author, a literary approach that certainly sits better with my existential atheism. Chanady defined and illustrated the genre as follows: “the fantastic […] reaffirmed hegemonic Western rational paradigms by portraying the supernatural in a contradictory manner as both terrifying and logically impossible […] My examples of the fantastic were drawn from the work of major French writers such as Merimee and Maupassant” ("Magic Realism" 430). Unfortunately, Chanady was unable to illustrate her concept of the Fantastic with examples of Aboriginal horror writing. Why? Because none existed until my novel was published. Whereas Mudrooroo, Scott and Wright incorporated the Magical Realism of Aboriginal Australian mythology into their novels, and asked their readers to accept it as not only plausible but realistic and even factual, I wanted to create a style that blends Aboriginal mythology with the European tradition of vampires, but ultimately rejects this “cultural matrix” due to enlightened rationality, as I deliberately and cynically denounce it all as fanciful superstition.Certainly, the adjective “fantastic” is liberally applied to much of what we call Gothic horror literature, and the sub-genre of Indigenous vampire literature is not immune to this confusion, with non-Australian Indigenous author Aaron Carr’s 1995 Native American vampire novel, The Eye Killers, unhelpfully described in terms of the “fantastic nature of the genre” (Tillett 149). In this novel,Carr exposes contemporary Native American political concerns by skillfully weaving multiple interactive dialogues with horror literature and film, contemporary U.S. cultural preoccupations, postmodern philosophies, traditional vampire lore, contemporary Native literature, and Native oral traditions. (Tillett 150)It must be noted, however, that Carr does not denounce the supernatural vampire and its associated folklore, be it European or Laguna/Kerasan/Navajo, as illogical or fanciful. This despite his “dialogues with […] contemporary U.S. cultural preoccupations [and] postmodern philosophies”. Indeed, the character “Diana” at one stage pretends to pragmatically denounce the supernatural whilst her interior monologue strenuously defends her irrational beliefs: the novel reads: “‘Of course there aren’t any ghosts,’ Diana said sharply, thinking: Of course there were ghosts. In this room. Everywhere” (197). In taking this stock-standard approach of expecting the reader to believe wholeheartedly in the existence of the Undead, Carr locates his work firmly in the Aboriginal Gothic camp and renders commentators such as Tillett liable to be called ignorant and uninformed when they label his work fantastic.The Aboriginal Gothic would leave the reader convinced a belief in the supernatural is non-problematic, whereas the Aboriginal Fantastic novel, where it exists, would, while enjoying the temporary departure from the restraints of reality, eventually conclude there are no such things as ghosts or vampires. Thus, my Aboriginal Fantastic novel That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! was intended from the very beginning of the creative writing process to be an existentially diametric alternative to Magical Realism and the Aboriginal Gothic (at least in its climactic denouement). The narrative features a protagonist who, in his defeat, realises the danger in superstitious devotion and in doing so his interior monologue introduces to the literary world the new Aboriginal Fantastic genre. Despite a Foucauldian emphasis in most of my critical analysis in which an awareness of the constructed status and nature of the subject/focus of knowledge undermines the foundations of any reductive typology, I am unhesitant in my claim to having invented a new genre of literature here. Unless there is, undiscovered by my research, a yet-to-be heralded work of Aboriginal horror that recognises the impossibility of its subject, my novel is unique even while my attitude might be decried as hubristic. I am also cognizant of the potential for angry feedback from my Aboriginal Australian kin, for my innovative genre is ultimately denigrating of all supernatural devotion, be it vampiric or Dreamtime. Aboriginal Fantastic writing rejects such mythologies as dangerous, fanciful superstition, but I make the (probably) too-little-too-late defence that it rejects the Indigenous existential rationale somewhat less vigorously than it rejects the existential superstitions of Catholicism and/or vampirism.This potential criticism I will forbear, perhaps sullenly and hopefully silently, but I am likely to be goaded to defensiveness by those who argue that like any Indigenous literature, Aboriginal Australian writing is inherently Magical Realist, and that I forsake my culture when I appeal to the rational. Chanady sees “magic realism as a mode that expresses important points of view, often related to marginality and subalternity” ("Magic Realism" 442). She is not alone in seeing it as the generic cultural expression of Indigenous peoples everywhere, for Bhabha writes of it as being the literature of the postcolonial world (6) whilst Rushdie sees it as the expression of a third world consciousness (301). But am I truly betraying my ancestral culture when I dismiss the Mrart as mere superstition? Just because it has colour should we revere ‘black magic’ over other (white or colourless) superstitions? Should we not suspect, as we do when seated before stage show illusionists, some sleight of (writing) hand? Some hidden/sub-textual agenda meant to entertain not educate? Our world has many previously declared mysteries now easily explained by science, and the notion of Earth being created by a Rainbow Serpent is as farcical to me as the notion it was created a few thousand years ago in seven days by an omniscient human-like being called God. If, in expressing this dubiousness, I am betraying my ancestors, I can only offer detractors the feeble defence that I sincerely respect their beliefs whilst not personally sharing them. I attempt no delegitimising of Aboriginal Australian mythology. Indeed, I celebrate different cultural imaginaries for they make our quotidian existence more colourful and enjoyable. There is much pleasure to be had in such excursions from the pedantry of the rational.Another criticism I might hear out--intellectually--would be: “Most successful literature is Magical Realist, and supernatural stories are irresistible”, a truism most commercially successful authors recognise. But my work was never about sales, indeed, the improbability of my (irresistible?) fiction is didactically yoked to a somewhat sanctimonious moral. My protagonist realises the folly and danger in superstitious devotion, although his atheistic epiphany occurs only during his last seconds of life. Thus, whilst pushing this barrow of enlightened rationality, my novel makes a somewhat original contribution to contemporary Australian culture, presenting in a creative writing form rather than anthropological report, an understanding of the potential for melding Aboriginal mythology with Catholicism, the “competing Dreamtimes, white and black” as Turcotte writes ("Re-mastering" 132), if only at the level of ultimately accepting, atheistically, that all are fanciful examples of self-created beyond-death identity, as real--or unreal--as any other religious meme. Whatever vampire literature people read, most such consumers do not believe in the otherworldly antagonists, although there is profound enjoyment to be had in temporarily suspending disbelief and even perpetuating the meme into the mindsets of others. Perhaps, somewhere in the sub-conscious, pre-rational recesses of our caveman-like brains, we still wonder if such supernatural entities reflect a symbolic truth we can’t quite apprehend. Instead, we use a totemic figure like the sultry but terrifying Count Dracula as a proxy for other kinds of primordial anxieties we cannot easily articulate, whether that fear is the child rapist on the loose or impending financial ruin or just the overwhelming sense that our contemporary lifestyles contain the very seeds of our own destruction, and we are actively watering them with our insouciance.In other words, there is little that is new in horror. Yes, That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! is an example of what I call the new genre of Aboriginal Fantastic but that claim is not much of an original contribution to knowledge, other than being the invention of an extra label in an unnecessarily formalist/idealist lexicon of literary taxonomy. Certainly, it will not create a legion of fans. But these days it is difficult for a novelist to find anything really new to write about, genre-wise, and if there is a reader prepared to pay hard-earned money for a copy, then I sincerely hope they do not feel they have purchased yet another example of what the HBO television show Californication’s creative writing tutor Hank Moody (David Duchovny) derides as “lame vampire fiction” (episode 2, 2007). I like to think my Aboriginal Fantastic novel has legs as well as fangs. References Althans, Katrin. Darkness Subverted: Aboriginal Gothic in Black Australian Literature and Film. Bonn: Bonn UP, 2010. Bhabha, Homi. Nation and Narration. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. Bunson, Matthew. The Vampire Encyclopedia. New York: Gramercy Books, 1993. Carr, Aaron A. Eye Killers. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1995. Chanady, Amaryll. Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved versus Unresolved Antinomy. New York: Garland Publishing, 1985. Chanady, Amaryll. “Magic Realism Revisited: The Deconstruction of Antinomies.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature (June 2003): 428-444. Cheung, Theresa. The Element Encyclopaedia of Vampires. London: Harper Collins, 2009. Clark, Maureen. Mudrooroo: A Likely Story: Identity and Belonging in Postcolonial Australia. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2007. Gelder, Ken. The Oxford Book of Australian Ghost Stories. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. Halloran, Vivien. “L224: Introduction to World Literatures in English.” Department of English, Indiana University, 2014. 2 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.indiana.edu/~engweb/undergradCourses_spring.shtml›. McKee, Alan. “White Stories, Black Magic: Australian Horror Films of the Aboriginal.”Aratjara: Aboriginal Culture and Literature in Australia. Eds. Dieter Riemenschneider and Geoffrey V. Davis. Amsterdam: Rodopi Press (1997): 193-210. Mudrooroo. The Indigenous Literature of Australia. Melbourne: Hyland House, 1997. Mudrooroo. The Undying. Sydney: Harper Collins, 1998. Mudrooroo. The Promised Land. Sydney: Harper Collins, 2000. Reed, Alexander W. Aboriginal Myths, Legends and Fables. Sydney: Reed New Holland, 1999. Riendes, Ildiko. “The Use of Gothic Elements as Manifestations of Regaining Aboriginal Identity in Kim Scott’s Benang: From the Heart.” Topos 1.1 (2012): 100-114. Rushdie, Salman. “Gabriel Garcia Marquez.” Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. London: Granta and Penguin Books, 1991. Shoemaker, Adam. Mudrooroo. Sydney: Harper Collins, 1993. Starrs, D. Bruno. “Keeping the Faith: Catholicism in Dracula and its Adaptations.” Journal of Dracula Studies 6 (2004): 13-18. Starrs, D. Bruno. That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! Saarbrücken, Germany: Just Fiction Edition (paperback), 2011; Starrs via Smashwords (e-book), 2012. Tillett, Rebecca. “‘Your Story Reminds Me of Something’: Spectacle and Speculation in Aaron Carr’s Eye Killers.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 33.1 (2002): 149-73. Turcotte, Gerry. “Australian Gothic.” Faculty of Arts — Papers, University of Wollongong, 1998. 2 Aug. 2014 ‹http://ro.uow.edu.au/artspapers/60/›. Turcotte, Gerry. “Re-mastering the Ghosts: Mudrooroo and Gothic Refigurations.” Mongrel Signatures: Reflections on the Work of Mudrooroo. Ed. Annalisa Oboe. Amsterdam: Rodopi Press (2003): 129-151. Unaipon, David. Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines. Eds. Stephen Muecke and Adam Shoemaker. Carlton: The Miegunyah Press, 2006.