Lexis

Differentiating synonyms and adjective subclasses by syntactic profiling

Daniel Henkel — 2020-06-12

Twenty adjectives belonging to five intuitively recognizable semantic families, age (old, young), size (large, small, big), color (black, white, red, yellow, blue), modality (possible, impossible, necessary, likely, sure) and emotion (happy, sad, glad, sorry) were inventoried in a 5-million word corpus tagged for part of speech (POS) and lemma. Regular expressions were used to target specific contextual parameters including syntactic function (adnominal or predicative), determiners, grammatical subject and intensifiers, while manual estimates were obtained from random samples of 500 occurrences per adjective. Benchmark data, for purposes of comparison, were first collected for the category as a whole using POS tags, from which it was observed that four major determiners and six copula verbs were present in 80-90% of all occurrences. Adjective families were found to share common, distinctive syntactic profiles, with similar predispositions to adnominal or predicative function and sim...

List of references

Vincent Hugou — 2020-06-12

This select bibliography lists a number of references which will be useful to all scholars wishing to keep abreast of a variety of recent discussions on the adjective category.

An Aslian origin for the word gibbon

Teckwyn Lim — 2020-06-12

This article examines the etymology of the word gibbon, which is not yet clear. The article presents a phonemic analysis using the ALINE algorithm which suggests that the root word is Northern Aslian kbɔɲ, used by Menraq communities in the heart of Peninsular Malaysia. This article reviews morphological, ethno-geographical, semantic, historical and linguistic evidence that supports this hypothesis. The article proposes Malay as an intermediary, noting that several other Aslian words entered European languages via Malay.

It looks like this complementizer used to be an adjective

Mathilde Pinson — 2020-06-12

The conjunction like meaning ‘as if’ is usually considered to derive from the preposition. There exists, however, a striking parallel between the impersonal post-copula use of the conjunction (e.g. It’s like_{AS IF} he didn’t see it) and the extraposed construction of the now extinct adjective like meaning ‘likely’ with a covert complementizer (e.g. It’s like_ADJ ø he didn’t see it). This paper therefore aims at sustaining the hypothesis of the adjectival origin of like_{AS IF} with the help of the Corpus of Historical American English. By documenting the geographic, semantic and syntactic expansion of like_{AS IF}, this study suggests that the disappearance of the attributive use of the adjective for reasons of isomorphism triggered the constructionalization of the two remaining adjectival constructions. The constructionalization of like_{AS IF} can be formalized as follows: [it copula Adj [ø + Clause]] ↔ [probability] > [it copula [Comp + Clause]] ↔ [comparison].

Sur les spécificités discursives de (be) likely

Grégory Furmaniak — 2020-06-12

Cet article vise à remplir un manque relatif dans les études consacrées à la modalité en anglais en explorant les propriétés discursives de l’adjectif modal likely au sein d’un corpus stratifié en modes de discours. L’étude quantitative et qualitative permet d’identifier trois emplois différents de likely qui se distinguent chacun par leur attraction pour un mode de discours spécifique, pour un type de modalité donné (épistémique ou existentielle), ainsi que pour des configurations syntaxiques et argumentatives particulières. Toutefois, l’étude permet également de mettre au jour des propriétés communes à tous les emplois de la forme étudiée, à savoir une forte compatibilité avec les procès existentiels, avec le renvoi à l’avenir et avec des enchaînements logiques, en particulier, le lien de cause/conséquence.

Adjectives or Verbs? The Case of Deverbal Adjectives in -ED

Jean Albrespit — 2020-06-12

Among the different ways an adjective can be formed, one of them is the use of the past participle of a verb, as in, for instance: The house was tucked far back from the main road. This process is not a straightforward case of derivation: an ambiguity often remains as to the status of the V-ED form, between adjective and verb, especially with adjectival passives. The aim of this article is to show how verbs can be “stabilised” into adjectives. With excited in they were excited, the stabilisation is complete, whereas with locked in the door was locked, the deriving verb can be reactivated, as in the door was suddenly locked. The parameters surveyed are: the semantics of the verb, agentivity (recoverable or not), prefixing (for instance the prefix be- in bedecked or the negative prefix un- in unchecked), lexicalization (particularly the contribution of the noun in a collocation of the type abandoned child) and, finally, syntax (attributive or predicative position). The conclusion whic...

Composite colour strings in English: adjectival or nominal?

Philippe De Brabanter — 2020-06-12

This paper looks into the category membership of colour words that enter into combination with modifiers like bright, dark, light, or pale. The English grammatical literature usually assumes that these ‘composite colour strings’, used attributively or predicatively, form adjective-adjective compounds. Closer scrutiny, however, reveals difficulties with this view. First, it is unusual for adjectives to modify adjectives. Second, even if they are compounds, it is unusual for their comparative and superlative inflections to be marked not on the head of the structure, but internally on the modifier, as in brighter red. These difficulties lead us to question the compoundhood of those strings, but also to explore the possibility that, at least in some predicative and attributive uses, the colour words in them are nouns. Using data from the BNC and COCA, we test our intuitions and those found in the literature. We conclude that the adjective-adjective compound analysis of composite colour ...

Feeling, emotion and the company they keep: what adjectives reveal about the substantives feeling and emotion

Stéphanie Béligon — 2020-06-12

This paper analyzes the adjectives modifying the substantives emotion and feeling in contemporary American and British English. It argues that although the two nouns refer to affects and are treated as synonyms in dictionary definitions, they are not semantic equivalents. The study of their collocations with adjectives shows that emotion refers to pre-semantic experience, whereas feeling designates affects that have been the object of a more elaborate cognitive treatment. This paper also aims to show that the semantic characteristics of the two substantives reflect their morphology and their historical evolution.

Introduction

Vincent Hugou — 2020-06-12

This thematic issue presents a collection of six papers devoted to the adjective category which illustrates the breadth of current research interests found in the French/Belgian community of English linguistics scholars. The first article, written by Daniel Henkel (Université Paris 8), offers a quantitatively documented overview of five semantic families of adjectives (age, size, color, modality, emotion) that demonstrates that the items within each family share a distinctive syntactic profile and that the profiling approach is also well-suited to observe a number of significant differences between certain quasi-synonyms.

Stéphanie Béligon (Sorbonne Université) analyzes the different adjectives modifying the substantives emotion and feeling in contemporary American and British English. The study shows that in spite of their semantic similarities, the two lexemes correspond to different visions of affects, since emotion refers to pre-semantic experience whereas feeling designates affe...