Development of Adjectival Use and Meaning Structures in Swedish Students' Written production

This thesis is about the development of adjective use and meaning structures examined from a cognitive linguistic perspective. Adjectives modify nominal meanings and it is in context, in the interaction with the noun that the adjective meaning and configuration is determined. Nearly 13,000 adjective-noun combinations from texts written by Swedish students in grades 3, 5, 9, and 11/12 were analysed according to the LOC model (Ontologies and Construals in Lexical Semantics, Paradis, 2005) with regard to domains, noun ontology, adjective gradability, adjective position, and adjective function. Furthermore, the use of figurative language was studied. The results show a development from adjectives predominantly modifying concrete nouns to increasingly abstract meanings from a broad range of adjective and noun domains. The younger students use adjectives predominantly in the predicative position but there is a gradual shift towards attributive use, and attributive uses are the most common in the highest grade. Adjectives are primarily used in a descriptive function, but in the highest grade approximately one third of all adjectives are used in a classifying function. Scalar adjective construal is the most common in all grades, but the proportion of scalar uses decreases in favour of an increase in non-gradable uses. Figurative language is rare in all grades, but there is an increase in metaphorical language over the school years

Processing negation in a miniature artificial language

In two miniature artificial language learning experiments, we compare the processing of narrow and broad negation, corresponding to prefixal negation (unhappy) and free-standing negation (not happy) respectively, with that of non-negation (happy). Three artificial prefixes were invented to express the three meanings above. The meaning scope expressed by the negation types was manipulated in the experiments, and the processing of the three forms was tested through a picture– word verification task. In Experiment 1, the scope expressed by prefixal negation was included in the scope expressed by free-standing negation, while in Experiment 2, there was no overlap between the two negation types and the scope of free-standing negation was limited to the intermediate range of a scale. Experiment 1 showed that narrow negation is more difficult to process than the non-negated meanings, but not as difficult as broad negation. Experiment 2 showed that when the meaning scope of broad negation was restricted to the middle range, the processing difficulty found in Experiment 1 disappeared, as it did not take longer for participants to identify the middle range compared to the ends of the scale. We show that the chunking of the negated meanings relative to one another plays a role in the processing cost of these forms