All Questions
Tagged with adjectives syntax
19 questions
11
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How can adjective-noun order in French be explained by parameter theory?
I just finished reading The Atoms of Language. The gist is that languages have parameters, one of which will tell you which side of a phrase to add a new word.
But in some languages, like French and ...
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9
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3
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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 ...
- 111
8
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3
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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)?
6
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3
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Are there any other rules for adjective order?
At the English Language and Usage Stackexchange site, the question was asked What is the rule for adjective order? and the answer boiled down to:
(article) + number + judgement/attitude + size + ...
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2
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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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5
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4
answers
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Can predicate adjectives take more modifiers than attributive adjectives in English? Across languages?
Witness this noun phrase that has an attributive adjective:
"the angry girl"
Witness this sentence that has a predicate adjective:
"The girl is angry."
Both adjectives in the last two ...
- 8,780
5
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2
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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, ...
- 3,472
5
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0
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Is there any difference in meaning or nuance when the adjective follows the noun in Georgian?
Many languages allow the order of adjectives compared to nouns to vary, but for different reasons:
Some languages have very free word order in which case there is little difference between adj + noun ...
- 14.8k
4
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2
answers
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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 ...
- 319
3
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1
answer
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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 ...
- 33
3
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1
answer
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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 ...
- 31
2
votes
1
answer
79
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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 ...
- 129
1
vote
1
answer
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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 ...
- 289
1
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2
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231
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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 ...
- 21
0
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0
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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 &...
- 1
0
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0
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203
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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 "...
- 1
0
votes
0
answers
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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 ...
- 1,078
0
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0
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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 ...
- 1,272
0
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0
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Multiple Adjectives in an X-Bar Tree
I'm having some trouble integrating phrases with multiple adjectives into x-bar trees. Based on what I can understand from the textbook, I would get something like this (apologies for the verb ...
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