The order of prenominal adjectivals in unambiguous unbroken strings in English

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, 1980

Ordering prenominal modifiers with a ranking approach

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2011.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 57-58).In this thesis we present a solution to the natural language processing task of ordering prenominal modifiers, a problem that has applications from machine translation to natural language generation. In machine translation, constraints on modifier orderings vary from language to language so some reordering of modifiers may be necessary. In natural language generation, a representation of an object and its properties often needs to be formulated into a concrete noun phrase. We detail a novel approach that frames this task as a ranking problem amongst the permutations of a set of modifiers, admitting arbitrary features on each candidate permutation and exploiting hundreds of thousands of features in total. We compare our methods to a state-of-the-art class based ordering approach and a strong baseline that makes use of the Google n-gram corpus. We attain a maximum error reduction of 69.8% and average error reduction across all test sets of 59.1% compared to the state-of-the-art, and we attain a maximum error reduction of 68.4% and average error reduction across all test sets of 41.8% compared to our Google n-gram baseline. Finally, we present an analysis of our approach as compared to our baselines and describe several potential improvements to our system.by Jingyi Liu.M.Eng

Contextual Determinants of Adjective Order:Beyond Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini

Previous research on adjective ordering in linguistics andpsychology has focused primarily on the unmarked or defaultorder of adjectives, as in large blue car. Inverted word order,as in blue large car, which violates the proposed semanticconstraints on adjective placement, received relatively littleattention. In two studies we show that the inverted order is notas limited in scope as previous researchers have argued. Wepropose that the inverted word order reflects the subjectivedistance principle: the attribute that is psychologically closerto the speaker is mentioned first. Our explanation draws onresearch on word order in binomials, thus connecting twopreviously unrelated research traditions on word order inlinguistics and cognitive psychology

(In)flexibility in Adjective Ordering

PhDThe present thesis investigates adjective ordering across languages, with an emphasis on Greek and Cypriot Maronite Arabic (CMA). Cross-linguistically, attributive adjectives are argued to be ordered according to their semantic class (Hetzron 1978; Dixon 1982; Cinque 1994, 2010, among others). Given that the orders attested cross-linguistically are very similar, it is claimed that all orders have the same underlying order, which is imposed by syntax as in Cinque 2010. If adjective ordering restrictions are indeed syntactic, the question that arises is how to account for violations of the order. I defend the view that the order can be affected by various factors. Following Sproat and Shih (1991) and Cinque (2010), I assume that there is an indirect vs. direct distinction in adjectival modification, and I claim that Greek polydefinites are an instance of the former, whereby the adjective merges inside a Reduced Relative Clause – a PredP as in Bhatt 2000. The additional definite article is not a true article, but the realisation of Pred0. Moreover, I argue that adjective ordering phenomena give us an insight into whether adjectives modify the noun as heads or phrases. The claim is that both are necessary; adjectives that are structurally closer to the noun combine with it as heads, while structurally higher adjectives, e.g. adjectives with complements or adjectives that have a predicative source, are phrasal-modifiers. The ability of adjectives to have access to both types of modification also leads to apparent violations of the order. Finally, I discuss new data from CMA, which allows both prenominal and postnominal adjectives. Adjectives borrowed from Greek are found in either position, while native Arabic adjectives are strongly preferred postnominally. I argue that adjective ordering and placement is inflexible in CMA, and that the facts follow by the need of phrases in the extended nominal projection to inherit a nominal feature

Japanese mimetics as prenominal modifiers: The distribution of accented and accentless mimetics

This thesis investigates the grammatical properties and functions of Japanese mimetics when they are used as prenominal modifiers. I focus on the cases where mimetics modify nouns with physical referents. I argue that mimetic-na (M-na) should be considered neither ungrammatical nor less acceptable than other modifiers, contrary to suggestions in the previous literature. Looking at different grammatical markers combined with a mimetic, I demonstrate that M-na gives rise to a situation-descriptive reading, that mimetic-sita (M-sita) denotes a characterizing property and that mimetic-no (M-no) denotes a defining property, in Roy’s (2013) terms. The thesis includes examples in French, Russian and Spanish to illustrate these three different interpretations. As for the syntactic structures of mimetic modifiers, I demonstrate that M-na is a tensed clausal modifier, while M-sita is a tenseless attributive modifier, following Hamano (1986, 1988, 1998). More specifically, I claim that M-sita is an AP. I provide evidence showing that M-na is tensed (allowing a temporally anchored interpretation), whereas M-sita disallows tensed interpretations. There is currently no consensus about the grammatical status of M-no. Based on the distributions of mimetic and non-mimetic words presented in this thesis, I suggest that M-no can be marked by either the genitive or the copula. Each of the modifiers enters into a stacking structure when they occur together. I show that semantics associate with structural positions, and argue that mimetic modifiers appear in the order of M-na, M-sita, M-no in a hierarchical structure. This thesis sheds light on the various grammatical properties of mimetics in relation to their prosody. In broad agreement with previous research, I claim that accentless mimetics, as in M-na and M-no, denote an abstract quality, while I argue that M-sita (which involves an accented mimetic) denotes a physical concrete property. I consider the bare accented mimetics to be somewhat verb-like

Noun phrases in early Germanic languages

Synopsis: On the premise that syntactic variation is constrained by factors that may not always be immediately obvious, this volume explores various perspectives on the nominal syntax in the early Germanic languages and the syntactic diversity they display. The fact that these languages are relatively well attested and documented allows for individual cases studies as well as comparative studies. Due to their well-observable common ancestry at the time of their earliest attestations, they moreover permit close-up comparative investigations into closely related languages. Besides the purely empirical aspects, the volume also explores the methodological side of diagnosing, classifying and documenting the details of syntactic diversity. The volume starts with a description by Alexander Pfaff and Gerlof Bouma of the principles underlying the Noun Phrases in Early Germanic Languages (NPEGL) database, before Alexander Pfaff presents the Patternization method for measuring syntactic diversity. Kristin Bech, Hannah Booth, Kersti Börjars, Tine Breban, Svetlana Petrova, and George Walkden carry out a pilot study of noun phrase variation in Old English, Old High German, Old Icelandic, and Old Saxon. Kristin Bech then considers the development of Old English noun phrases with quantifiers meaning ‘many’. Alexandra Rehn’s study is concerned with the inflection of stacked adjectives in Old High German and Alemannic. Old High German is also the topic of Svetlana Petrova’s study, which looks at inflectional patterns of attributive adjectives. With Hannah Booth’s contribution we move to Old Icelandic and the use of the proprial article as a topic management device. Juliane Tiemann investigates adjective position in Old Norwegian. Alexander Pfaff and George Walkden then take a broader view of adjectival articles in early Germanic, before Alexander Pfaff rounds off the volume with a study of a peculiar class of adjectives, the so-called positiona

Attributes of Attribution

Attributive adjectives have a number of properties that distinguish them from predicative adjectives and other modifiers of the noun. For example, attributives are subject to ordering restrictions that do not apply to other types of nominal modifier, and they exhibit scope interactions unlike predicatives or relative clauses. This thesis argues that these properties are best captured by an analysis in which all attributives share the same relationship with the noun and discusses the ways in which our understanding of a number of phenomena at the edges of attribution must change. One influential theory of adjective ordering restrictions (discussed in Larson 2000a and Cinque 2010, among others) holds that violations of the ordering hierarchy that applies to many attributive adjectives are due to the existence of modifiers that superficially look like attributives but are in fact derived from reduced relative clauses. These derived attributives are merged higher than underived attributives and are unordered with respect to each other. I show that the offending adjectives do not behave syntactically like true relative clauses, whether full or reduced. In addition, while all attributive semantics is asymmetric, true relatives involve symmetric modification. This single-source approach entails a rethinking of some of the effects commonly understood to result from attribution. I will address two such effects, which could be taken as evidence in favour of a derived attributive approach to attribution, and show that they are best analyzed using a homogeneous approach to attribution. In languages where the noun follows its modifiers, the ordering of AP and PP modifiers is free and their scope varies with c-command. In noun-initial languages their order is fixed, with the AP preceding other modifiers, and their scope is ambiguous. This pattern could be taken as evidence for a second source of adnominal modification, if the high position of the AP in noun-final languages is a reduced relative clause. However, I show that both the ordering and scope effects are due to a novel constraint restricting the linear order of attributive and other modifiers. The ordering patterns of AP and PP modifiers are therefore not evidence for the existence of derived attributives. One piece of evidence for the dual-source theory of attribution is that some adjectives have unexpectedly rigid requirements for adjacency and nonintersectivity (for example, in the phrase hard worker). I demonstrate that cases like these are not true attribution but are instead a type of bracketing paradox. I argue that these bracketing paradoxes are derived by movement at LF. This movement (and indeed all movement) is restricted in the type of information that must be retained before and after the operation takes place, but is other- wise free. Therefore, these examples do not provide evidence for two different types of attributive modifier. The proposed analysis of attribution allows for a simplification of adjectival modification, as it does not require a distinction between derived and underived attributive adjectives. The analysis presented in this thesis entails a novel categorization of certain adjectival phenomena, but readily accounts for the empirical intricacies of attribution