Questions tagged [adjectives]
Words that describe or modify a noun or noun phrase.
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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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Infinitive clauses referring to an adjective before a noun [closed]
We know that infinitive clauses can sometimes refer to adjectives before nouns. I feel with what adjectives they can do that, but I don't have any reason for it.
Examples;
You can buy the best book ...
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Are there languages which have ways to distinguish between an adjunct noun and an adjective?
(Take some example). Do other languages (than English) have means distinguish between their adjunct nouns and adjectives or is it a very complex/grammatical structure that cannot possibly be ...
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A concept called extreme-opposites
I am novice in linguistics but I have a keen interest in natural (spoken) languages. There is this concept in my mind called "extreme-opposites" or "extreme-antonyms". The concept goes like this:
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How can be these two types of adjective distinguished terminologically?
In adjectives there are two main groups:
First Group: adjectives that their 3 grades (base, comparative and superlative) are changed whether regularly (nice > nicer > nicest) or irregularly (good > ...
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Is there a technical term for the kind of adjective A which appears in sentences of the form 'The object O is A.'?
Question.
Is there an attested technical term for the construction
'Object O is A.'
where O is a noun and A is an adjective?
Remarks.
The phenomenon that I am hoping to read about, and find a ...
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Is there a term for an adjective or noun becoming a verb, like "to adult"?
Is there a term for a word that is traditionally an adjective or noun becoming a verb over time? A word I'm thinking of is "adult", which Merriam-Webster has reported has become increasingly ...
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Has there been cross-linguistic work on differential adjective-noun order?
In recent years, a massive amount of attention in linguistics has been devoted to the variation within language varieties of grammatical structures caused by semantic and discourse-pragmatic factors, ...
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What is the part of speech of 'modifiers to adjectives'?
This is something I was just thinking about. Adjectives in a lot of languages can also take modifiers of their own: very big, more intelligent, etc... But is there an actual word for the part of ...
user19661
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Data/Resource for adjectives related to nouns
I am looking for resource or some way(maybe using multiple resources) which can help me figure out which adjectives to use. For example:
weight > 40 : heavier
age > 40 : older
I am not sure how to ...
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Case assignment with prepositions
Consider these examples:
'I am happy with my parents'
my parents gets assigned Case by 'with'.
*'I am proud with my parents'
My question is as follows:
What is the reasoning for 2 being ...
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What is the x-bar tree of 'I am proud of my students'? (having trouble with proud)
I am having trouble attaching the 'proud' to the 'am'. 'Am' is a verb and 'proud' is an adjective for the noun 'I', so should come as an adjunct for 'I', but here it would have to somehow come from ...
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Where can I find a lexicon of adjectives?
I am currently looking for a list of adjectives that I can use as a seed for a machine learning model. These do not need to be annotated. Are there any open source lexicons that exist which could be ...
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Term for -ed as an adjectival suffix?
By which I mean changing a noun into an adjective by adding '-ed'.
For example: the noun 'horn' becomes the adjective 'horned'
Is there a term for the type of adjective that is formed from a noun by ...
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How is the the adjective in a definite noun phrase different from a nondefinite one in Germanic and Balto-Slavic languages?
In the wikipedia article about definiteness I came upon this:
In the Germanic languages and Balto-Slavic languages, for example (as still in modern German and Lithuanian), there are two paradigms ...
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Do other languages than English have verbals ,too?
As I understand it, verbals are nouns,adjectives and adverbs which are derived from verbs.
I don't understand if a verbal is indeed one of the three parts of speeches mentioned or a part of speech of ...
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