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The nature of head movement has been debated since its discovery (see Dékány 2018 for discussion). While it is generally agreed that head movement (the sort that results in the formation of complex heads) is subject to more stringent locality restrictions than phrasal movement, little else is uncontested. In this article, I will argue that a flexible (but literal) interpretation of Harizanov and Gribanova's (2019) definition of head movement (more specifically, their "amalgamation") is needed to account for the movement of suffixal adjectives (As) in Aleut. These As typically suffix to nominals, but under certain conditions surface in verbs between the root and agreement morphology. I show that these As base-generate as adjuncts of NPs and undergo head movement into the verbal complex. I then explore two theories of word-building which would require only phrasal movement on the part of suffixal As—based on ideas put forth in Julien (2002) and Compton and Pittman (2010)—and conclude that phrasal movement alone is too unrestricted to account for the phenomenon, overgenerating As in unacceptable sites. In contrast, previous theories of head movement are too restrictive, only permitting a head and the head of its complement to form a complex head (e.g., Travis 1984; Embick and Noyer 2001); this excludes heads in adjunct positions, like suffixal As, from participating. However, Harizanov and Gribanova's definition of amalgamation, whereby heads Raise or Lower into the nearest c-commanding or c-commanded head, uniquely allows head movement to occur out of specifier positions and even adjunct positions. This comparative flexibility correctly permits Aleut suffixal As to form a complex head with verbal morphology, explaining their incorporation deep within the structure of the verbal complex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a debate concerning the history of demonstratives. Are they primitive or grammaticalized elements in languages? Moreover, notwithstanding the relevance of demonstratives to NP, nominals are not regarded as a potential source of grammaticalized demonstratives. The present study, based on synchronic observations, argues that the proximal demonstratives ða 'this' and ʔulaaʔ 'these', which constitute the nucleus of the demonstrative system of Standard Arabic, are grammaticalized elements. It also offers a new grammaticalization pathway and a new source of demonstratives. Arabic proximal demonstratives evolve from possessive adjectives, which are themselves grammaticalized from nominals that mean 'oneself' and 'companion'. The motive underpinning this pathway is that the lexical sources and the grammaticalized elements share the property of being egocentric. Concerning medial and distal demonstratives, two further stages of grammaticalization occur: (1) the phonological derivation of two medial demonstratives from their corresponding proximal demonstratives and (2) the phonological derivation of two distal demonstratives from their corresponding medial demonstratives. The extended grammaticalization pathway is as follows: nominals that mean 'self' and 'companion' > possessive adjectives > proximal demonstratives > medial > distal. This pathway implies that the source of demonstratives may comprise more than one lexical word; however, they are meaningfully related, and their grammaticalization pathway towards forming the demonstrative system of Standard Arabic applies uniformly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kennedy (Linguist Philos 30:1–45, 2007) forcefully proposes what is now a widely assumed semantics for absolute gradable adjectives. On this semantics, maximum standard adjectives like "straight" and "dry" ascribe a maximal degree of the underlying quantity. Meanwhile, minimum standard adjectives like "bent" and "wet" merely ascribe a non-zero, non-minimal degree of the underlying quantity. This theory clashes with the ordinary intuition that sentences like "The stick is straight" are frequently true while sentences like "The stick is bent" are frequently informative, and fans of the indicated theory of absolute gradable adjectives appeal to loose talk in response. One goal of this paper is to show that all extant theories of loose talk are inconsistent with this response strategy. Another goal is to offer a revised version of Hoek's (Philos Rev 127:151–196, 2018, in: Proceedings of the 22nd Amsterdam Colloquium, 2019) recent theory of loose talk that accommodates absolute gradable adjectives after all, while being defensible against a range of important concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Foco (Interdisciplinary Studies Journal) is the property of Revista Foco and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Nasleđe is the property of University of Kragujevac, Faculty of Philology & Arts and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Dilemas Contemporáneos: Educación, Política y Valores is the property of Dilemas Contemporaneos: Educacion, Politica y Valores and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article studies the function of Copular Predicate Constructions in everyday English conversation. We compare predicate adjective constructions (PA) and constructions with a predicate nominal containing an adjective (PAN). We ask whether the attributive function of the adjective or the presence of a noun in the PAN leads to a difference in function in the two constructions. We propose that in most cases the adjective determines the function of the construction, leading to many parallels in usage between the PA and PAN constructions. A comparison with predicate nominal constructions (PN), in contrast, shows that not including an adjective in the constructions leads to a different set of meanings and implications. The conversational usage of these constructions provides evidence for a partial correspondence of form to function: Copular Predicate Constructions often constitute a complete turn in conversation, and if not a full turn, form their own prosodic units. Other properties of these constructions—the definiteness of the NP and the presence or absence of a N—correspond to different interactional work. A comparison of all three constructions shows that the adjective plays a determining interactional role, despite differences in syntactic configuration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The so-called 'Big Mess Construction' (BMC) frustrates standard assumptions about the structure of nominal groups. The normal position of an attributive adjective is after the determiner and before the noun, but in the BMC, the adjective precedes the determiner, e.g. that strange a sound, so big a scandal, too lame an excuse. Previous accounts of the BMC are couched in 'Phrase Structure Grammar' (PSG) and view the noun or the determiner (or the preposition of) as the root/head of the BMC phrase. In contrast, the current approach, which is couched in a 'Dependency Grammar' (DG) model, argues that the adjective is in fact the root/head of the phrase. A number of insights point to the adjective as the root/head, the most important of which is the optional appearance of the preposition of, e.g. that strange of a sound, so big of a scandal, too lame of an excuse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores what we have named the construction. These structures have been discussed in Bosque 1989 as «cognate participle constructions»: secar los platos bien {secados ~ secos} «to dry the dishes well ~ off». Drawing from the discussions about resultativity, the distinctions between manner and result readings, and the interpretation of bien as an indicator of maximal degree, an analysis of these sequences is postulated from a neoconstructionist approach that accounts for two aspects: (1) the presence of the constituent is not responsible for the result reading where that interpretation is available, and (2) the manner/result readings not only arise from different merge positions in the main structure of the constituent , but also from the type of projection quantified by bien (Voice* or Place). The tests used to advance this analysis allow for the clear identification of the main differences between these constructions and the levels of modification where the past participle form is the only option available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Linguistica is the property of Linguistica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article presents a discourse approach to the case variation between the nominative and the partitive in Finnish copula complement adjectives. Using video recordings of spontaneous spoken Finnish, I show that the case marking of these adjectives reflects the discourse functions of demonstratives, which constitute the vast majority of copula subjects in the material. I also demonstrate that aspects of stance-taking in interaction are of relevance for the distribution of case in this construction. Based on the results of the present study, as well as on previous discussion in the literature, I analyse Finnish copulative constructions with partitive and nominative adjectives in terms of conversational patterns of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies have identified that conceptual categories corresponding to nouns exhibit semantic domain effects: (1) classification into biological ones reflects a non-additive consideration of their defining dimensions whereas classification into artefactual and, presumably, social nouns is based on an additive one (2) nominal biological concepts are less graded than artifacts. Nevertheless, much uncertainty exists about the structure of conceptual categories corresponding to multidimensional adjectives. We propose that the effects observed for concepts corresponding to nouns are connected to a property we term discrete dimension accessibility and ask how it is manifested in multidimensional concepts corresponding to adjectives. We then hypothesize that (a) ratings of dimension-counting structures can be used as a diagnostic for these properties (b) the dimensions of multidimensional concepts corresponding to adjectives are inherently discrete. We report an acceptability rating experiment involving 42 adult Hebrew speakers revealing that with nouns, dimension-counting constructions with artefactual and social predicates are rated higher than ones with biological predicates, hence confirming (a). With adjectives, ratings for dimension-counting constructions remained high across the domain manipulation, hence confirming (b). We argue that the interaction between discrete dimension accessibility and lexical category indicates that lexical distinctions interact with conceptual ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aspectual modifiers that have adverbial and adjectival counterparts are an important source of information for researching lexical aspect in the nominal domain. One class of such modifiers are adverbs of completeness (completamente 'completely', totalmente 'totally'), which are maximizers when modify adjectives, and their correspondent adjectives (completo 'complete', total 'total'). This paper addresses the inheritance of aspectual features and its relation to degree in event nominalizations of incremental theme verbs (traduccción 'translation', destrucción 'destruction') through the analysis of the modification performed by adjectives of completeness in Spanish. The proposal combines a syntactic account of deverbal nominalizations with a scalar approach to aspect. Adjectives of completeness are argued to be aspectual modifiers, with a contribution equivalent to that of their adverbial counterparts both in the verbal and in the adjectival domain, establishing thus a parallelism between degree modification of adjectives, verbs and nominals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sophisticated senator and legislative onion. Whether or not you have ever heard of these things, we all have some intuition that one of them makes much less sense than the other. In this paper, we introduce a large dataset of human judgments about novel adjective-noun phrases. We use these data to test an approach to semantic deviance based on phrase representations derived with compositional distributional semantic methods, that is, methods that derive word meanings from contextual information, and approximate phrase meanings by combining word meanings. We present several simple measures extracted from distributional representations of words and phrases, and we show that they have a significant impact on predicting the acceptability of novel adjective-noun phrases even when a number of alternative measures classically employed in studies of compound processing and bigram plausibility are taken into account. Our results show that the extent to which an attributive adjective alters the distributional representation of the noun is the most significant factor in modeling the distinction between acceptable and deviant phrases. Our study extends current applications of compositional distributional semantic methods to linguistically and cognitively interesting problems, and it offers a new, quantitatively precise approach to the challenge of predicting when humans will find novel linguistic expressions acceptable and when they will not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates a near synonymous pair of prepositions in emotion constructions, at and by. Data from COCA concerning high-frequency adjectives or past-participles' collocations with at and by indicate that recurring emotional adjectives or past-participles which precede at and by are, in contrast to other prepositions in emotion constructions, largely identical. The emotion terms of at and by share certain similarities in that they both arise suddenly and momentarily. However, their following nominals show distinctive aspects, specifically, complements of at focus on the resultant states and those of by describe events. This paper argues that this difference is attributable to the schematic meanings of the prepositions. Although both prepositions express causality of momentary emotion, they have different schematic meanings, viz. target (at) and agent (by). Given the schematic meaning of target, the nominals following at are static and resultative. In contrast, since the schematic meaning of agent relates to dynamic changes, the complements of by describe dynamic situations. Based on the underlying assumption that the collocation patterns of at and by with emotion terms and following nominals are semantically motivated by their schematic meanings, this study examines at and by in three phases. The first phase comprises a qualitative analysis of historical data relating to the emergence of the schematic meanings of the prepositions; the second involves a corpus analysis, using the COCA to determine the emotion causality of prepositions and their conceptual rationale in emotion constructions synchronically; and the final phase consists of an experimental analysis to identify their different conceptualizations in emotion constructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the authors present a presuppositional account for a class of evaluative terms that encode both a descriptive and an evaluative component: slurs and thick terms. The authors discuss several issues related to the hybrid nature of these terms, such as their projective behavior, the ways in which one may reject their evaluative content, and the ways in which evaluative content is entailed or implicated (as the case may be) by the use of such terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Affixes and lexical verbs in Malay occupy the same head position in the verb phrase (VP). This raises the question of how is it that these two different morphemes with different syntactic categories - one a functional head and the other a lexical head - could occupy the same head position in a verb phrase of a sentence in Malay. This article will attempt to shed some light on this question. In this article, we will analyse the verb phrase structure in Malay using the Minimalist Program Approach. Based on Larson (1988) and Chomsky (1995), we will posit the VP shell hypothesis in which the verb phrase structure in Malay has two layers of the VP: one is the VP and the other is a small v (little verb phrase vP). Based on these two layers of the verb phrase, this discussion will revolve around the notion that each of these two layers has its own head and projections in their own VP structures. The head position of the VP node is occupied by the lexical verb while the affix is basedgenerated at the head v of the vP, which is a functional category. We will use, as examples, Malay active and passive sentences and demonstrate how this two-layer analysis could adequately describe Malay sentences. We assume that each sentence has its own functional heads which are used to hold affixes: active or passive affixes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Malay grammars produced in the 17th century were a product of Dutch influence. These grammars were written a century after the arrival of the Portuguese and seven years after the arrival of the Dutch. The development of Malay grammatical studies occurred in stages beginning in 1603 with an analysis of conjugations by Houtman, followed by a brief explanation about the formation of words in Malay by Wiltens and Danckaerts in 1623 and finally in 1655, a systematic Malay grammar authored by Roman. Roman's grammar is a complete Malay grammar that discusses aspects of Malay word classes. However, in this grammar, adjectives were not categorised as an independent word class, instead, it is placed under the noun word class. This paper will explain the discussion of adjectives in Roman's grammar. Among the aspects that will be elaborated is the position of adjectives in the noun namen word class. In addition, discussions about the formation of adjectives and the degree of comparison of adjectives will be presented as well. Roman's treatment of adjectives will also be compared with the treatment of adjectives in today's Malay grammar. This paper concludes that adjectives discussed by Roman were parallel with the climate of opinion in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the acquisition of the comparative and superlative adjectives by Jordanian EFL students. The data were collected from two groups of Jordanian EFL students, i.e. 30 tenth graders and 30 second year university students. Each group consists of 15 males and 15 females. The participants were given a questionnaire of 20 sentences which cover the regular rules for forming the comparative and the superlative forms using novel nonsense adjectives. According to the findings of the study, university students showed that they master the rules to some extent more than the tenth graders. The overall performance of both groups is better when it comes to monosyllabic adjectives; however, when adjectives are polysyllabic, students' performance becomes worse. On the other hand, slight difference in favor of female was found in terms of students' gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past two decades, queer has grown into an established critical approach to social science. Correspondingly, the term queer has emerged as a recognised brand in the language of academia. This paper examines the potential risks that such linguistic institutionalisation poses for queer as a critical and emancipatory endeavour. Building on Michael Billig's argument that the bias towards 'big nouns' in academic discourse tends to further entrench the power of academic elites, I draw a parallel between queer and CDA (critical discourse analysis) as two emerging academic brands in order to determine whether queer is one such big noun and how this may affect the very capacity of queer scholars to commit themselves to critique and self-critique. I conclude by outlining a modest proposal to ensure that the term queer remains available to be appropriated by whoever shares the premises and the aspirations underlying the queer project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Linguistica is the property of Linguistica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Linguistica is the property of Linguistica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article explores the possibility that lexical categories share a common set of primitive notions (Mourelatos 1978) that get translated to different domains, each one of them expressed by a different category (Jackendoff 2002). The empirical side of this paper discusses the correlations between Aktionsart and scale structure in the case of deverbal adjectives with the affix -ivo '-ive'. It is shown that there is initial plausibility that unbounded events translate as open scales, while bounded events become upper-closed scales. This supports a program of research where derivational affixes are transitioners from one domain to the other, and whose job is to adapt the notions found on the base to a language that is interpretable inside the new lexical category. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the hypothesis that all comparative sentences- nominal, verbal, and adjectival-contain instances of a single morpheme that compositionally introduces degrees. This morpheme, sometimes pronounced much, semantically contributes a structure-preserving map from entities, events, or states, to their measures along various dimensions. A major goal of the paper is to argue that the differences in dimensionality observed across domains are a consequence of what is measured, as opposed to which expression introduces the measurement. The resulting theory has a number of interesting properties. It characterizes the notion of 'measurement' uniformly across comparative constructions, in terms of non-trivial structure preservation. It unifies the distinctions between mass/count nouns and atelic/telic verb phrases with that between gradable and non-gradable adjectives. Finally, it affords a uniform characterization of semantically anomalous comparisons across categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses a paper which lays out a historical scenario to explain forms with vrddhi-looking long vowels in the root which are sporadically observed in some nominal forms in Latin. Topics covered include (derivational) compounds in Latin such as convicium 'angry noise' and suspicio 'suspicion' and simplex adjectives like sacri- pertaining to the sacred (place/rites) and acri- 'sharp', the vowel lengthening in nominal compounds, and vowel lengthening in simplex adjectives.

We present a Spanish corpus data study that shows that event-related by -phrases in the two types of passives are qualitatively different with respect to the types of complements they take: with verbal passives we find more strongly referential nominals (e.g. proper names, pronouns, demonstratives, regular definites), whereas with adjectival passives, we mainly find weakly or non-referential nominals (e.g. indefinites, bare nominals, weak and generic definites). These differences comply with an account, according to which the event in adjectival passives remains in the kind domain, restricting event modification to kind modification. Furthermore, the data show that there are no qualitative differences in the complements we find in state-related by -phrases of either passive, which have the same properties as those in event-related ones with verbal passives. We take this fact to support the claim that there are two different kinds of by -phrases with adjectival passives: event-related ones which modify an event kind (the VP/PrtP before adjectivisation), and state-related ones which modify a state token (the AP). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Basing itself on a corpus of one thousand complex NPs, this study investigates the relationships that two attributive adjectives contract with the constituents of nominal compounds of varying size in English (e.g. new basic safety standards). Essentially, there are four logically possible relationships: (i) both adjectives modify the nominal head, (ii) both adjectives modify the nominal modifier, (iii) the first adjective modifies the head and the second adjective the modifier and (iv) the first adjective modifies the modifier and the second adjective the head (crossed modification). While options (i) and (iii) are strongly represented in the data, crossed modification is not at all present. Across all compound sizes, at least three factors shape the empirical patterns: a functional factor whereby major heads are more easily singled out than minor heads, which in turn are more available than modifiers; a structural factor whereby more deeply embedded constituents are less available than more independent constituents; and a proximity effect which encourages the modification of the first noun by the second adjective. There may be an additional saturation effect which discourages the modification of one noun by two adjectives. On the face of it, the non-occurrence of crossed modification may be connected to the well-known ban on crossing association lines. However, despite its descriptive adequacy, this principle is unconvincing. Instead, a functional explanation is proposed which centres on the possibility of working out modification relationships. Initial steps are taken towards developing a model of when (and why) the no-crossing constraint is inviolable, violable or non-existent [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

The need to distinguish two syntactic sources for adnominal adjectives (a direct modification and a relative clause one), with the associated interpretive properties, turns out to have certain implications for the semantic classification of adjectives. We will see that it provides evidence for the existence of a class of truly privative adjectives, and for the conclusion that subsective adjectives of the tall/big type and of the skillful/good type cannot be reduced for the direct modification class to (context-sensitive) intersectivity. Furthermore, the available syntactic evidence appears to converge with Partee's more recent position that the principal divide is between predicative and non predicative adjectives, which correspond in the adnominal case to the relative clause and direct modification sources, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of PISMO: Journal for Linguistics & Literary Studies / Zeitschrift für Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft is the property of Bosnian Philological Society and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

It is widely acknowledged in the literature that the common function of the modifier in nominal compounds is the classifying function. Classifying modifiers specify what kind of entity is being denoted by the head noun, that is, they specify subkinds; e.g. apple juice 'a kind of juice made from apples'. While the classifying function can certainly be regarded as the default function of lexical modification, lexical modifiers in nominal compounds may also have functions other than classification. Drawing on functional types of noun phrase modification from the typological literature, the article discusses lexical modifiers in German nominal compounds with an attitudinal or an identifying function, and the conditions under which they arise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the behavior of deadjectival nominalizations in Spanish is studied regarding the presence of an eventuality reading. It is shown that whereas abstract nominalizations (la belleza del libro 'the beauty of the book') clearly encode an eventuality according to standard tests, neuter nominalizations (lo bello del libro 'the beautiful part of the book') lack any eventuality reading altogether. It is argued that the difference lies in the different kind of nominalization process involved. As for abstract nominalizations, after the nominalizer is merged, the nominal functional head Classifier will encode the stative eventuality derived from the adjective root. In the case of neuter nominalizations, we lack any nominal functional structure, but rather the AP is directly selected by the neuter determiner, which, following a suggestion by McNally & de Swart (2012), is the syntactic realization of Chierchia's (1982) ∩ ('cap') operator, which shifts a property into its entity correlate. Moreover, a slight modification of this semantic operation allows a simple and principled analysis of the difference between the two main neuter deadjectival nominalizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studies in Polish Linguistics is the property of Jagiellonian University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Abstract: This article surveys some leading generative ideas about agreement and case, and connects them to several universal and near-universal observations noted by typologists. It begins with the familiar fact that adjectives can agree with noun phrases in number and gender but not in person, whereas verbs can agree in person as well—depending on the structure. From there it moves to the fact that verbs typically do not agree with their objects unless they also agree with their subjects. Several possible types of agreement with objects are then identified and distinguished, and some substantive similarities between object agreement and subject agreement are noted. It is shown that both subject agreement and object agreement are sensitive to the case morphology borne by the noun phrase (dative versus accusative, ergative versus nominative) in some languages but not in others, and the implications of this result for the assignment of case are considered. In all, the discussion covers four known linguistic universals in the area of agreement and case, and proposes three new ones. These are all explained in terms of two universal properties of the agreement relation and one parameter. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article examines the position of Portuguese adjectives in the nominal syntagma and aims to determine the criteria of their collocation. The analysis is based on the corpus CETEMPúblico. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper makes a case for the category of subjective compounds, that is adjective-noun word units which convey subjective meaning, for example little bleeder, old chum, half-victory. These compounds are characterized grammatically by their behaviour as a unit in phrase structure, their internal inseparability and the non-attribute-like behaviour of the adjectival components. Adjective and noun have a high degree of collocational cohesion, which is reflected in high mutual information scores. This collocational cohesion is semantically motivated by the subjective evaluative features which adjective and noun share. To accommodate these subjective compounds we propose a prosodic, field-like model of the English noun phrase (NP), rather than a linear subjective-objective model as traditionally recognized in the literature. A prosodic model, which recognizes that subjective meaning is spread over the whole NP, can account both for the strong tendency of more subjective modifiers to precede more objective ones and for the minor countercurrent of more subjective elements to follow more objective ones. Such a model, we argue, also captures the fact that subjectification can entail both leftward and rightward movement in NP structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In line 31 of Beowulf, the direct object of ahte 'owned' is land. But neither the compound leofland nor the sequence leof land (adjective + substantive) leads to a convincing interpretation of the text. It is suggested that the direct object land separates the preceding adjective leof from the following head word fruma, and leof ... fruma functions as the subject of the clause. Examples for this type of unexpected word-order sequence can be quoted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

. This article examines the role of Number with regards to adjective distribution in French, and focuses on two kinds of abstract nouns: activity nominals and quality nominals. We show, based on proposals by Knittel (2005), that two patterns of adjectival modification must be distinguished, on both semantic and syntactic grounds: (i) taxonomic modification, which corresponds to the expression of subkinds, is independent from the presence of NumP; (ii) qualifying modification, which occurs only if NumP is present in the nominal structure. Taxonomic modifiers qualify as direct modifiers in the sense of Cinque (2010), whereas qualifying modifiers behave either as direct or as indirect modifiers. Finally, we account for the particular behavior that activity and quality nominals display with regards to adjectival modification by suggesting, along the lines of Borer (2005), that the Num head un(e) is responsible for the partitioning of the noun's referent. This partitioning, in turn, enables the presence of a qualifying adjective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is suggested that the Proto-Indo-Europeans had an adjective * num-téro- (or * nun-téro-) 'present, quick' with variant * nu-téro-; cf. Hittite nuntaras 'promptly, soon' as genitive of * nuntar n. < * num/n-tro- 'haste'. Cuneiform Luvian nanuntarri i̭a- 'of the present' may be influenced by * num-téro- while the Young Avestan nomen gentile Naotara- is an internal derivative of Proto-Indo-Iranian * nutára- < * nu-téro- 'quick'. The proposed etymology of this name as '*the quick one' fits well into the Avestan contexts. Besides, Greek ἴκταρ 'nearby' can be connected with Young Avestan išarə 'at once'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from the assumption that nominals contain (at least) one internal temporal variable which may be located in time by various cross-linguistic means (see Pustejovsky 1995, 1998 a.o.), the aim of the present paper is to examine the way in which adjectival modifiers influence the temporal interpretation of head nominals. We will analyze examples which contain relational adjectives (e.g. 'antique', 'modern') and intensional adjectives (e.g. 'former', 'future', 'present'). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides with a descriptive overview of the main productive patterns in present-day Spanish compounding, their structural and semantic characteristics. In this paper we try to maintain a theory-neutral point of view, although some theoretical stances are mandatory in order to accomplish the descriptive aims. Following previous work (for example Rainer and Varela 1992), a great number of minor processes and the so-called 'syntagmatic compounds' are excluded from the discussion. The plan is to show that Spanish compounds form a relatively simple and harmonic scheme: it is a predominantly endocentric system that produces new Nouns and Adjectives, which can be left- or right-headed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deadjectival nominals with -sa and -mi in Japanese are both phonologically transparent and morphologically decomposable. However, whilst -sa essentially serves to form nouns out of adjectives, -mi forms function as semantic labels with specific meanings. We examined -sa and -mi nominals in three experiments, an eye-movement experiment presenting -sa and -mi forms in sentence contexts and in two word recognition experiments using (primed and unprimed) lexical decision, to investigate the nature of their form-level representations. Whilst the word recognition experiments produced the same pattern of results for -sa and -mi forms, the eye-movement experiment demonstrated clear differences: -mi forms elicited longer reading times compared to -sa forms, except when the particular meanings of -mi forms were contextually licensed. These results show how different semantic properties affect the performance of derived words that have the same type of word level representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This work is aimed at initiating a discussion on a new perspective, namely the Prototypical-Cognitive Grammar, focused on its contributions to Spanish grammar. To that end, this approach is applied to the analysis of the Nominal, reconsidering the definition of noun in order to emphasize the particular conception of meaning underpinned here. We describe the compositional path of the Nominal. In particular, two problems are considered: common vs. proper noun (in order to stress the moment when the nominal is grounded), and the position of the adjective. We claim that the context of use masters the ordering of nuclei along the compositional path.en [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Res Humanitariae is the property of Res Humanitariae and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper aims at describing how qualification and quantification meet when quantity nouns are accompanied by a quantifier and a basic adjective. As in English, the combination between a quantifier and a basic adjective can be interpreted as a complex determiner, with a nuance of qualification in the background however. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Persian Light Verb Constructions (LVCs), consisting of a light verb and a preverb, fall into two groups: separable and inseparable. The nominal preverbs in the former, unlike those in the latter, can function as direct object DP argument, can be modified by an adjective, and can be relativized, scrambled and focused on by Wh-interrogatives. In this paper, it is argued that the (in)separability of LVCs cannot necessarily be an indication of the fact that LVCs are formed at two levels of representation. It is shown that (in)separability of LVCs follows from the semantic and morphosyntactic properties of preverbs and light verbs in the language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a convergent evidence for the compilation of adjectives in the Northeastern Central (NC) dialect of Catalan. The NC Catalan data of the adjectives show an agreement asymmetry. The data suggest that the linear order and relative scope of postnominal adjectives do not coincide. The adjunction-of-adjective view explains that adjectives can be adjoined to NP to achieve the postnominal word order and accounts the scope interpretation of adjectives based on adjunction's order.