Questions tagged [adjectives]
Words that describe or modify a noun or noun phrase.
108 questions
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Constructing a Czech adverb from an adjective
I am looking for an algorithm to create Czech adverbs when given an adjective. I was looking for a decent set of rules, but I was not able to find anything comprehensive. Going from example words I ...
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How does the syntax work for a phrase like "already much too cocky?"
I'm working on a syntax tree for the sentence "The belief that syntactic theory reveals the inner structure of sentences emboldened the already much too cocky professor," and I'm stuck on &...
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How does one discern between atomic, relational, and intentional adjectives?
Some adjectives are atomic. They're just there and they presuppose nothing. Jolly is an example of this. "Bobby is a jolly boy" tells you everything you need to know about Bobby.
Other ...
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Examples of languages that mark both nouns and adjectives for possessor
This question by Slavus asked two days ago has this comment by Janus Bahs Jacquet.
I think in languages that have case, even outside Indo-European, it is more common than not that at least ...
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What is the difference between attributive adjective and predicative adjective?
When I began to read articles related to English adjectives, I often encountered these two names: "predicative adjectives" and "attributive adjectives". It seems that the author ...
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Which non-Indoeuropean languages have noun-adjective agreement?
For example, agglutinative/fusional languages where case or possessive suffixes/endings must be attached both to a noun and all adjectives that modify it. Or any other kind of noun-adjective agreement....
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Why are these adjectives being presented as adverbs in syntax tree (Carnie, 3rd Edition)?
I am in a Syntax class where we use the textbook Syntax: A Generative Introduction, 3rd Edition by Andrew Carnie.
There is a tree presented in the chapter on x-bar theory that indicates that the words ...
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Hyponymy and hypernymy for adjectives
Would the concepts of hyponymy and hypernymy be used for adjectives? Hyponymy and hypernymy are usually used for nouns. And for verbs the WordNet people have created the concept troponymy for a manner ...
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What is the formal semantics approach to predicative adjectives?
I am wondering if there is a standard treatment of expressions such as "x is ready" or "x is proud". It seems to me that something like BE(x,ready) or BE-READY(x) is not enough, ...
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How do languages without adjectives, that treat them instead as verbs, handle more complex adjective-like phrases?
I am looking at papers like Where have all the adjectives gone? The case of Jinghpaw which show stuff like:
fi=go ggba=thinn re.
3sg=TOP be.big=SUPER COP
'He is the biggest.'
Also, Approaches to the ...
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Do any languages greatly restrict the placement of adjectives/adverbs in a phrase or sentence?
I am working on a conlang and wondering how natural languages might limit the placement of "modifiers" (adjectives and adverbs) in a sentence.
For example:
I eventually walked to the store.
...
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How come you can say "I am glad that ...", but you can't say "I am fine that ..." [closed]
For example, you might say
"I am glad that we are having pizza for dinner",
but you wouldn't say
"I am fine that we are having pizza for dinner".
Or you might say
"I am fine ...
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Why French Adjectives Uses BAGS
In French, most adjectives are positioned behind the noun e.g.
vache bleue
médecin étrange
orange énevrant
But sometimes you have an adjective following BAGS -- the adjective describes beauty, age,
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Is there a name for "noun-verbing" adjectives?
Is there a name for adjectives that take the form of "noun-verbing", like "rabbit-hunting" or "self-driving"? Do this form only occurs in English?
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Detached Predicative with NONFINITE Clauses
I have just stumbled upon a sentence:
Dressed in a white dress, Stella looked breathtakingly beautiful.
I was wondering if the very first part of the sentence (Dressed in a white dress-nonfinite "...
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Question on Avestan Adjectives
Looking at various examples of Avestan, I am confused on how the adjectives work. For instance,
Ahura Mazda, Vohu Manah, Angra Mainyu, Spenta Armaiti, Aka Manah, etc are all adjective first.
But Asha ...
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In the sentence 'he was very early', would it be correct to say that 'early' functions as both a noun and the object of the sentence?
I'm currently trying to construct my own language as an exercise, and I need to know if such a description is linguistically accurate, or if the word should be described otherwise.
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Why can't you treat prepositions as simply noun/verb modifiers (i.e. as adjectives or adverbs)?
I am working on a conlang and have (for many months/years?) been perplexed by the prepositions. They standout because they are extremely hard to pinpoint what they actually mean, unlike a noun or verb,...
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How do languages other than English deal with compound, hyphenated adjectives?
In looking at some long, hyphenated adjectives in English (or this), you find:
a twenty-one-gun salute
a five-acre farm
a five-day week
the four-colour problem
the low milk-and-cream-yielding dam
the ...
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Materialization of nouns by adjectives
I am not even an amateur in linguistics, especially semantics. I want to use this idea in computational linguistics that I am also new there. The idea is how to deal with nouns that become more ...
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Software internationalisation - displaying gendered adjectives
I'm currently working on an internationalisation project for a large web application - initially we're just implementing French but more languages will follow in time. One of the issues we've come ...
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Why "a liter of water" but not "a 100ºC of water"?
Imagine a volume of water, 100 ml in size, with a temperature of 100ºC. Interestingly, you can refer to the water as "100ml of water" but you cannot call it "100ºC of water". That ...
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Linguistic term for using masculine adjectives in front of feminine/plural nouns for emphasis in a language that has grammatical gender
Adjectives in languages that have grammatical gender have to be in agreement with the nouns they modify. In Classical Arabic, however, some adjectives were commonly used in their base form (masculine ...
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What are the pros and cons of having adjectives appear first?
In the English, we say:
Red apple
Red is an adjective. apple is a noun. Red tells us that, well, the apple is red.
In other languages, such as Arabic, it is the other way around. I.e.:
تفاحة ...
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If adjectives denote functions of type <<e,t>,<e,t>>, then what denotation of *be* will allow adjectives to appear in predicative position?
Suppose [[gray]] = λf ∈ D<e,t> . [λx ∈ De . f(x) = 1 and x is gray]. Since this function is of type <<e,t>,<e,t>>, it would seem that sentences like Julius is gray are ...
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Did Proto-Indo-European put the adjective before or behind the noun?
Did PIE put the adjective behind the noun (like Romance languages usually do) or before the noun (like Germanic languages)?
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Are these "phrases" or "clauses" before a noun a modifier adjective?
In these clauses or sentences "I love those "I love you" messages" or "I hate those "I love you" messages",
Is this "phrase" or "clause", &...
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What do you call the range of possible subjects a word can be predicated of
What do you call the range of possible subjects a word can be predicated of?
i.e., brown can be predicated of furniture but not numbers; running can be predicated of people but not rocks; fruitless ...
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Origin of describing emotions with adjectives associated with taste
You might have seen that most of the adjectives that are related to taste are used to describe emotions.
Salty, sour, sweet, bitter etc. We use these adjectives to describe people and their emotions.
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What does Potrefená mean in Czech? [closed]
There is a restaurant chain in the Czech Republic called the Potrefená Husa. Husa in Czech is Goose, but I can't find a meaning for Potrefená in any of my usual sources (Google Translate, dict.cc, ...
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Pronominalized adjectives in Lithuanian
This is a question for those who are native speakers of Lithuanian or have a very good proficiency in Lithuanian as a second language. As for your feeling, are the definite or pronominalized ...
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Historical development from adjective to concrete noun to more abstract noun
I'd really appreciate any knowledge or advice on further reading about the following. Excuse my naivete- I am at the start of this investigation.
I'm studying an historical corpus and I have found a ...
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Are there any studies on marked adjective order in the NP in head initial languages like Spanish or Albanian?
For example, Spanish unmarked NP order is Noun-Adjective ("libro rojo", "casa grande"). However, there are many situations where the order is reversed ("un rojo atardecer", "es un buen libro", "tienes ...
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Is there any language that has different morphology for individual-level and stage-level adjectives?
For example, the language might be such that a a stage-level adjective like "available" would agree in predicative position, but an individual-level adjective like "intelligent" would not.
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What grammatical features should we assign to the Danish superlative forms -st and -ste?
When entering Danish lexemes into Wikidata, I have been unsure which grammatical features one should assign to the Danish superlative forms "-st" and "-ste" for adjectives, e.g., in bedst and bedste. ...
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Adjective position in Provençal (Occitan)
Can anyone tell me the rules for adjective position in Provençal?
I know that, like most other Romance languages, most adjectives go after the noun, with some exceptions. But I can't find the exact ...
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Why do adjectives come before nouns in English?
Why does the attributive adjective come before a noun in English? In most languages, the adjective comes always after a noun. For example, white car is written as the equivalent of car white in Latin ...
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Does StanfordNLP have a problem with adverbs?
I suspect not, and I'm being dumb, but ...
Usain ran quickest.
is parsed (https://corenlp.run) as
NNP VBZ JJS.
Why JJS (Adjective, superlative) and not RBS (Adverb, superlative)?
Using extended ...
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The Grelling-Nelson Paradox
The following excerpt is from Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter.
Divide the adjectives in English into two categories: those which are self-descriptive, such as "...
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Different types of color adjectives
One the one hand, Berlin and Kay found a linguistic hierarchy of colors. On the other hand, some languages have several kinds of colors.
In French, color adjectives are invariable if they come from ...
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Name for adjectives modifying the verb within a noun rather than the noun itself (as in "illegal immigrant")
I'm interested in the phenomenon where people object to "illegal" as though it is inaccurate because the person implied by "immigrant" cannot be illegal in merely being a person. While moral and legal ...
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Is there a database which tags the "high/low" sense of comparative adjectives?
For example, “faster” is “high” (speed) whereas slower is “low” (speed). Similarly, "longer" is "high" and "shorter" aligns with "low".
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Is gradable vs absolute a universal distinction?
Inspired by multiple questions on ELU and in particular this recent question about 'correct', I wonder whether French has the similar concept of gradable vs absolute adjectives.
The idea is that some ...
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Past Participial Relatives are the sourse of Participial Adjectives, why?
I came across this statement in a work (Ph.D. Dissertation, p.158) by Asier Alcázar Estela in which he assumes that the Past Participial Relatives are the source of the Participial Adjectives. And he ...
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Is "bien décidés" an adjectival phrase?
Mais il me faut quelques volontaires bien décidés.
in that sentence, décidés is considered as an adjective right? So does the phrase bien décidés an adjectival phrase or adverbial phrase?
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Triggering emotions with language
Emotional responses to certain words is often argued to be a result of nurture(acquired through development), while emotional responses to Tone is largely attributable to nature(born with).
Shouldn't ...
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Terminology for chained, nested adjective anatomy
For the moment I am just considering adjectives and adverbs as the same sort of thing, basically modifiers for the noun or verb. I will probably only focus on nouns here for simplicity.
Some examples ...
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Are there languages where the imperative of "to be" (as in "be happy") is non-existent or achievable through vastly different means?
I know many languages don't have the word "to be" (e.g. Hawaiian), but I don't know how they form "to be" imperatives. I'm not asking specifically about Hawaiian, though that is welcome as well. ...
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What is the syntax of "second" in phrases like "the second most common problem"?
In English, words like "second", "third" etc. (also "next", I guess) can be used with a superlative to count down from the maximum.
Some dictionaries call "second" an adverb in this context (e.g. MW, ...
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Stolen, part of speech
I've checked several dictionaries for the word "stolen" only to find it labeled a verb. Virtually all of the examples sentences use it in a manner that I would have considered an adjective:
"The ...
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