Perceptual difficulty differences predict asymmetry in redundant modification with color and material adjectives

When referring to objects, speakers are often more specific than necessary for the purpose of establishing unique reference, e.g., by producing redundant modifiers. A computational model of referring expression production that accounts for many of the key patterns in redundant adjectival modification assumes that adjectives differ in how noisy (reliable), and consequently, how useful they are for reference. Here we investigate one hypothesis about the source of the assumed adjectival noise: that it reflects the perceptual difficulty of establishing whether the property denoted by the adjective holds of the contextually relevant objects. In Exp.1, we collect perceptual difficulty norms for items that vary in color and material. In Exp. 2, we test the highest (material) and lowest (color) perceptual difficulty items in a reference game and find that material is indeed less likely to be mentioned redundantly, replicating previous work. In Exp. 3, we obtain norms for the tested items in a second perceptual difficulty measure with the aim of testing the effect of perceptual difficulty within property type. The overall results provide preliminary support for the hypothesis that the propensity to redundantly use color over material adjectives may be driven by the relative ease of assessing an object’s color, compared to the relative difficulty of assessing its material.

NP-internal structure and the distribution of adjectives in Mə̀dʉ́mbὰ

This article discusses the structural and internal properties of adjectives in Mə̀dʉ́mbὰ, a Grassfield language spoken in the west region of Cameroon. It focuses on material inside the NP with a view towards establishing the structural positions of NP-internal constituents such as adjectives. I analyze adjectives and propose, following Scott, Gary-John. 1998. Stacked adjectival modification and the structure of nominal phrases. School of Oriental and African Studies Working Papers in Linguistics and Phonetics 8. 59–89, Scott, Gary-John. 2002. Stacked adjectival modification and the structure of nominal phrases. In Guglielmo Cinque (ed.), Functional structure in DP and IP: The cartography of syntactic structures, 91–120. New York: Oxford University Press that adjectives pattern within the DP just like adverbs pattern within the clause. In Mə̀dʉ́mbὰ, an adjective can be placed before the noun, after the noun or alternatively before and after the noun. Mə̀dʉ́mbὰ adjectives can further be distinguished as belonging to three classes: pure adjectives, verbal adjectives and nominal adjectives. In this paper I focus principally on the position in which attributive adjectives are generated inside the DP. However, issues relating to the internal structure of adjectives will also be mentioned. I show that Cinque, Guglielmo. 1994. On the evidence for partial N-movement in the Romance DP. In Guglielmo Cinque, Jan Koster, Jean-Yves Pollock, Luigi Rizzi & Raffaella Zanuttini (eds.), Paths towards universal grammar, 85–110. Georgetown: Georgetown University Press, Cinque, Guglielmo. 2003. The dual source of adjectives and XP-vs. N-raising in the Romance DP. Incontro annuale di dialettologia, Padua, 26, Cinque, Guglielmo. 2010. The syntax of adjectives: A comparative study. Linguistic Inquiry Monographs. Cambridge: MIT Press), and Laenzlinger, Christophe. 2005. French adjective ordering: Perspectives on DP-internal movement types. Lingua 115 views are both necessary to fully capture adjectival placement facts in Mə̀dʉ́mbὰ. Building on and refining the analysis given by these authors, I demonstrate that the type of mechanism involved in introducing adjectival modification correlates with the syntax of the adjective. On the proposal advanced here, depending on their syntactic distribution, adjectives are generated in specifier positions directly and NumP versus FP movement yields the surface structure.

Variation Within Idiomatic Variation: Exploring the Differences Between Speakers and Idioms

Corpus-based research on idiomatic variation has shown that idioms can be utilized with an extensive range of variation, including the possibility of idioms occurring with adjectival modification (e.g. make rapid headway), lexical variation (e.g. the calm/lull before the storm), and partial forms (e.g. birds of a feather [flock together]). Previous experimental research eliciting variation within idioms has tended to focus on unintended ‘slips of the tongue’, or errors in production. To date, no experimental study has explored the creativity that speakers can employ when using idioms. This study, by contrast, aims to elicit conscious and spontaneous productions of idiomatic variation, exploring just how creative speakers can be when using idiomatic expressions. Participants were asked to create headlines for newspaper snippets using provided idioms. They were explicitly told that the expression did not have to be exact and that they could be as creative as they wanted. The headlines for each idiom and each speaker were then examined. Variational patterns are observed for both idioms and speakers. For instance, some idioms (e.g. jump on the bandwagon) typically occur with partial forms, lexical variation, and/or adjectival modification; whereas other idioms (e.g. call the shots) are predominantly used in their canonical form. Similarly, some speakers (e.g. Speaker 14037) demonstrated considerable flexibility and playfulness when using the expressions, while other speakers (e.g. Speaker 14020) preferred minimal, if any, modification to the idioms. These results not only converge with previous corpus-based findings, but they also highlight the individual differences between speakers, as well as reveal how creative and innovative speakers can be when using idiomatic expressions.

Recursive adjectival modification in CLLRS

This paper sketches an analysis in Lexical Resource Semantics of adverbial and adjectival modification in nominal projections which is extensible to modification of other syntactic categories. It combines insights into the syntax-semantics interface of recursive modification in HPSG with underspecified semantics and type-logical meaning representations in the tradition of Montague grammar. The analysis is phrased in such a way that it receives a direct implementation in the Constraint Language of Lexical Resource Semantics as part of the TRALE system.

Modification

This chapter explores issues in the syntax and semantics of modification. The main focus is on adjectival modification, since the syntax and semantics of adjectives is fairly complex and illustrates many key issues. Section 13.1 provides an overview of the syntax of adjectival modification, Section 13.2 discusses three semantic classes of adjectives and how their meanings are represented, and Section 13.3 discusses adjectival modification at the syntax-semantics interface within the glue approach introduced in Chapter 8. Section 13.4 addresses problems in defining the semantic contribution of modifiers, which have a straightforward solution within our framework. The chapter concludes with a brief examination of the syntax and semantics of adverbial modification: Section 13.5 discusses the syntax and semantics of manner adverbs and sentential adverbs.

Adjective-Noun combinations in Romance and Greek of Southern Italy

This paper investigates aspects of adjectival modification in Romance and Greek of Southern Italy. In Italiot Greek, prenominal adjectives obey restrictions that do not exist in Standard Modern Greek, where all types of adjectives are allowed in prenominal position. As far as postnominal adjectives are concerned, in the textual tradition of Calabria Greek there is evidence of postnominal adjectives systematically articulated in definite nominal structures (henceforth DP s), in a structure similar to the so-called polydefinite construction that is typical of Standard Modern Greek (and of Greek in general since ancient times). Some residual evidence of such a construction is also found in Salento. Yet, in the varieties currently spoken in the two areas, postnominal adjectives are never articulated. The paper explores these patterns, with particular attention to the mechanisms potentially responsible for the loss of polydefiniteness.

Creating a small corpus to inform materials design in an ongoing English for Specialist Purposes (ESP) course for Orthodontists and Orthodontic Assistants

In order to inform materials design for an ESP course for orthodontists and orthodontic assistants, the teacher-researcher assembled a small corpus of practitioner-to-patient written texts by using a search engine and copying websites using ICEWeb software (Weisser 2014-2016), cleaning the text manually and then analyzing the text with AntConc software (Anthony, 2014).Findings include a balance between nominal and adjectival modification, tendency toward attributive processes in first and second person while third-person singular verbs have attributive and also material and mental processes. In addition, collocations of ‘bite’, ‘teeth’ and ‘braces’ are detailed.Throughout the article, the role of corpus compiler-as-researcher (Koester, 2010) is discussed as an advantage in understanding the corpus by locating findings within a deeper contextual use. Limitations are discussed regarding software use, cleaning and use of written discourse to inform spoken discourse.

Promoting books and places: A study of adjectival modification in persuasion and description

This is a study of adjectival modification, that is the use of adjectives and adjectival participles, in the genres of book information and place description. Book information represents a genre with a subtle, covertly persuasive function, while place description is taken to have little or no persuasive force. The study starts out with a quantitative element, establishing lexical densities of the eight texts in the data. This is followed by qualitative analyses of the functions which adjectives have in the genres examined. Answers are sought to these primary questions: 1) What is the role of modifying adjectives in the lexical density of the texts analysed? 2) What discourse functions do these adjectives fulfil in the two genres? The conclusions of the study include: 1) High occurrence of modifying items does not automatically equal nominal style. 2) High occurrence of modifying items is not an automatic sign of high lexical density. 3) The frequent use of modifiers in non-fiction is not limited to persuasion, since adjectives are also frequent in the genre in which the descriptive function is foregrounded.