Severing Scale Structure from the Adjective

I examine some of the rich set of transpositional process in the Samoyedic language Selkup, focussing on denominal adjectives. Selkup provides evidence that (i) some case inflections add semantic content to the lexical representation in addition to realizing a morphosyntactic feature, (ii) transpositions can be defined over already inflected word forms (in this case, nouns inflected for case and possessor agreement). In each case the morphology provides forms of a lexeme, it doesn’t create a new lexeme. This is in contrast to genuine cases of denominal adjectival derivation in the language such as privative/proprietive adjectives. I provide an analysis of the transpositions in the framework of Generalized Paradigm Function Morphology.

This paper provides a unified solution to two puzzles involving vagueness and scalar adjectives of the absolute lexical class (ex. bald, empty, straight etc.). The first puzzle concerns the proper analysis of the relationship between contextual effects associated with absolute adjectives and those associated with relative adjectives like tall, long or expensive. The dominant view in philosophy is that tall and bald are both vague constituents. However, an emerging view in linguistics is that the context-sensitivity exhibited by bald is not due to vagueness but a different phenomenon: imprecision (cf. Kennedy ). I argue that the properties of both tall and bald that appear to challenge our classical semantic theories are symptoms of a single phenomenon: vagueness. I provide a unified analysis of these properties that accounts for Kennedy's data using Cobreros, Égré, Ripley, and van Rooij (2010)'s Tolerant, Classical, Strict (TCS) non-classical logical framework. The second puzzle is the puzzle of the gradability of absolute adjectives. It has been observed that these constituents seem to have a non-context-sensitive meaning. However, on the other hand, they are clearly gradable (John is balder than Peter). I show how, using TCS, we can preserve the the empirical benefits of the proposal that these adjectives have absolute semantics, while constructing the pragmatic scales associated with them using methods in the same vein as van and van Rooij (2011a).

Lingua, 2008

Tungus proprietives, regularly derived from nouns by affixation, demonstrate a mixed behaviour. As adnominal modifiers, they have the full syntactic and morphological distribution of an adjective. Yet, the base noun retains some nominal properties: it can head its own syntactic phrase, control agreement on its modifier, trigger various anaphoric processes, pluralize, and take derivational affixes. These forms present a problem for the traditional view of syntactic categories, as they have the morphosyntactic properties of more than one part of speech. They are also important for the syntax/morphology interface, because the word structure and the phrase structure do not match: although the base noun selects modifiers as if it were an independent phrasal head, it is not an independent word in morphology. The paper shows that syntactic affixation analyses cannot adequately capture the Tungus data. Instead, I propose a constructional analysis based on the idea that relationships among classes of words are expressed in the lexicon by means of cross-cutting hierarchical types, where more specific types inherit information from more general types. The idiosyncratic behaviour of proprietives is lexically specified by the crossclassification of head values. Categorial information is inherited from adjectives and determines the external distribution of the phrase. At the same time, proprietives inherit the underlying noun's semantics (referentiality) and selectional properties. This analysis raises further questions about the nature of the traditional syntactic labels such as nouns or adjectives, namely, whether we are dealing with a new category type in each case of mixed categories.

English Language and Linguistics, 2011

This article is concerned with the sources, paths and mechanisms of change leading to noun-intensifying uses of adjectives, such asa complete mess,a whole bunch of crazy stuff,a particular threat. Such intensifying uses may develop from property-describing uses of adjectives, as discussed by Traugott (1989), Adamson (2000) and Paradis (2000, 2001, 2008). As pointed out by Bolinger (1972: 61), noun-intensifying uses may also develop from elements of the NP that have identifying functions, which can be either quantifying-identifying or identifying in the strict sense. The aim of this article is to provide a new synthesis of how these three pathways lead towards noun-intensifying meanings, focusing on the question of how the intensification scales necessary to these uses are acquired. We posit that the concepts of open and closed intensification scales (Kennedy & McNally 2005) can generalize over the intensifying uses from the three sources. The main mechanism of change is the foregrou...

2011

The Syntax of Adjectives: A Comparative Study, Guglielmo Cinque. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA (2010)., 202 pp., Price: $70 (s50) (hardcover), $35 (s25) (paperback), ISBN: 978-0-262-01416-8 (hardcover), 978-0-262-51426-2 (paperback)

Proceedings of the Nineteenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, 2015

One of the most common features across all known languages is their variability in word order. We show that differences in the prenominal and postnominal placement of adjectives in the noun phrase across five main Romance languages is not only subject to heaviness effects, as previously reported, but also to subtler structural interactions among dependencies that are better explained as effects of the principle of dependency length minimisation. These effects are almost purely structural and show lexical conditioning only in highly frequent collocations.

Transactions of the Philological Society, 2018

Linguistics in the Netherlands, 2008

It is well known that languages do not only differ in the features whereby they define their parts of speech (PoS) and in the number of PoS that they define, but also – and perhaps more importantly – in the levels of language structure at which they do so. As a confirmation, quite a few studies discussed the levels at which the noun can be defined across languages (Hopper & Thompson 1984, Mithun 2000, Lazard 1999). However, barring some notes in Thompson (1988) and Alfieri (2014), a similar approach to the study of the adjective class has never been proposed, although adjectives are missing more often than nouns across languages (see, e.g., Dixon 1982, Bhat 1994, Hengeveld 1992, Beck 2002; Dixon & Aikhenvald 2004, Haspelmath 2012). The aim of the talk is to fill this gap and present a typology of the levels of language analysis at which adjectival constructions can be coded across languages. Following Croft (2001: 66ff.), the “adjective” is defined as the most typical quality modifier construction in a language. A variety sample of 40 languages is, thus, gathered for the present talk and languages are classified on the level of language structure at which the most typical adjectival construction (i.e. quality modifier) is fixed. In the sample, the quality modifier construction is fixed at six main levels. Quality modifiers can be; simple stems marked by agreement in gender (Latin) or classifier (Dyirbal), and they can share most of their properties with nouns (Latin, Dyirbal) or verbs (Lavukaleve); derived stems that are formally different from a relative clause (that is, different markers code the two functions), agreeing in gender (Rig-Vedic Sanskrit) or classifiers (Yimas); derived stems that are also a relative clause (that is, a single affix code both functions, as in the relative-participles of Tibetan languages, like Garo, Genetti 1992, 2005); a clause that differs from a derived stem (i.e. a relative clause or a word-sentence marked for switch-reference, as in Tuscarora); a verb stem incorporated into a noun (Chukchi); finally, a phrasal constituent that is a quality lexeme settled in the modifier slot of the phrase without overt marking (Vietnamese), as in Hengeveld’s “flexible” strategy (see Rijkhoff & Van Lier 2013). From the analysis it emerges that the simple stem (i.e. the lexicon), the derived stem, the relative-stem, the phrase and the clause represent the focal layers of the lexico-syntax continuum defined by Croft (2001: 17), and the first sketch of a cross-linguistic theory of the levels of language structure.

Semas, 2023

Scalar implicature has been a top subject of inquiry in the Anglo-Saxon pragmat-ics field for quite a long time. Many experimental studies have been conducted about the interpretation and processing of weak quantifiers in English and other languages. Recently these types of studies have been conducted exploring a vast range of the so-called Horn scales, namely adjective scales. These stud-ies have shown that scalar implicatures are not always derived from the use of weak adjectives. Here I present experimental evidence coming from the study of the interpretation of scalar adjectives in Spanish that show that an enriched pragmatic context in addition to modalized propositions enhance lower-bound readings of weak scalar adjectives. Data also show that upper-bound readings are hardly derived by speakers, leading to the conclusion that scalar implicatures are pragmatic inferences derived from a handful of lexical items and not from a vast family of scalar terms.