The Notion of “Adjective” in Dhao; a Language Spoken in Eastern Indonesia

It is cross-linguistically defined that adjective is a word category that typically denotes quality and attributes. This category basically falls into semantic properties denoting age, dimension, values, and colours. They also indicate human propensities, physical properties, and speed. Syntactically, adjective typically functions as noun modifiers. However, many adjectives also share features with verbs and/or nouns. This makes adjectives not easy to define. Therefore, morphological and syntactic accounts are required, in addition to semantics, to define the prototypical characteristics of adjectives. This paper has shown that majority of lexemes denoting adjectival properties in Dhao share features with verbs. Although the prefix pa- can be attached to verbs and adjectives to generate causative meaning, adjectives are confined only to the second verb in serial verb construction, instead of being the predicate heads. Further, only four adjectives can function as noun modifiers in their bare forms. These latter adjectives are considered as pure or simple adjectives, while the other nine qualifying for adjectives as “recategorized” adjectives

Adjectival modification and multiple determiners

The present paper deals with the distribution of the definite determiner and certain related aspects of adjectival modification in Greek DPs. As (1) shows, determiners in Greek DPs precede adjectives and adjectives precede nouns. All three categories overtly agree in gender, number and case

Stoic Virtue: A Contemporary Interpretation

The Stoic understanding of virtue is often taken to be a non-starter. Many of the Stoic claims about virtue – that a virtue requires moral perfection and that all who are not fully virtuous are vicious – are thought to be completely out of step with our commonsense notion of virtue, making the Stoic account more of an historical oddity than a seriously defended view. Despite many voices to the contrary, I will argue that there is a way of making sense of these Stoic claims. Recent work in linguistics has shown that there is a distinction between relative and absolute gradable adjectives, with the absolute variety only applying to perfect exemplars. I will argue that taking virtue terms to be absolute gradable adjectives – and thus that they apply only to those who are fully virtuous – is one way to make sense of the Stoic view. I will also show how interpreting virtue theoretic adjectives as absolute gradable adjectives makes it possible to defend Stoicism against its most common objections, demonstrating how the Stoic account of virtue might once again be a player in the contemporary landscape of virtue theorizing

Evaluational adjectives

This paper demarcates a theoretically interesting class of "evaluational adjectives." This class includes predicates expressing various kinds of normative and epistemic evaluation, such as predicates of personal taste, aesthetic adjectives, moral adjectives, and epistemic adjectives, among others. Evaluational adjectives are distinguished, empirically, in exhibiting phenomena such as discourse-oriented use, felicitous embedding under the attitude verb `find', and sorites-susceptibility in the comparative form. A unified degree-based semantics is developed: What distinguishes evaluational adjectives, semantically, is that they denote context-dependent measure functions ("evaluational perspectives")—context-dependent mappings to degrees of taste, beauty, probability, etc., depending on the adjective. This perspective-sensitivity characterizing the class of evaluational adjectives cannot be assimilated to vagueness, sensitivity to an experiencer argument, or multidimensionality; and it cannot be demarcated in terms of pretheoretic notions of subjectivity, common in the literature. I propose that certain diagnostics for "subjective" expressions be analyzed instead in terms of a precisely specified kind of discourse-oriented use of context-sensitive language. I close by applying the account to `find x PRED' ascriptions

Lexical acquisition in elementary science classes

The purpose of this study was to further researchers' understanding of lexical acquisition in the beginning primary schoolchild by investigating word learning in small-group elementary science classes. Two experiments were conducted to examine the role of semantic scaffolding (e.g., use of synonymous terms) and physical scaffolding (e.g., pointing to referents) in children's acquisition of novel property terms. Children's lexical knowledge was assessed using multiple tasks (naming, comprehension, and definitional). Children struggled to acquire meanings of adjectives without semantic or physical scaffolding (Experiment 1), but they were successful in acquiring extensive lexical knowledge when offered semantic scaffolding (Experiment 2). Experiment 2 also shows that semantic scaffolding used in combination with physical scaffolding helped children acquire novel adjectives and that children who correctly named pictures of adjectives had acquired definitions

Survival processing versus self-reference : a memory advantage following descriptive self-referential encoding

Previous research has shown that rating words for their relevance to a survival scenario leads to better retention of the words than rating them for self-reference. Past studies have, however, relied exclusively on an autobiographical self-reference task in which participants rate how easily a common noun brings to mind a personal experience. We report five experiments comparing survival processing to a descriptive self-reference task in which participants rated how well trait words described them. Rating trait adjectives for survival value led to higher levels of recall and recognition than rating them for their relevance to a moving home scenario. Rating the adjectives for self-reference, however, led to higher levels of recall (Experiments 1 and 3) and recollection (Experiment 2) than survival rating. Experiment 4 replaced trait adjectives with trait nouns and found that self-reference led to greater recognition accuracy than survival processing. Experiment 5 used trait nouns followed by tests of free recall and found a memory advantage following self-reference that was not influenced by the imageability of the stimuli. The findings are discussed in terms of theories of the survival processing and self-reference effects and the relationship between them

Modeling Nonintersective Adjectives Using Operator Logics

Our topic is one that involves the interface between natural language and mathematical logic. First-order predicate language/logic does a good job approximating many parts of (English) speech, i.e., nouns, verbs and prepositions, but fails decidedly when it comes to, say, adjectives. In particular, it cannot account for the quite different ways in which the adjectives green and big modify a noun such as chair. In the former case, we can easily view a world in which the class of green chairs is the intersection of the class of green things with the class of chair-things. By contrast, the way big modifies a noun depends on the noun itself: a big chair is microscopic when compared to the smallest of galaxies. We investigate logical languages inspired by this phenomenon; particularly those with variables ranging over individuals and with variable-binding operators akin to generalized quantifiers

The American Male and Female 35 Years Later: Bem Sex Role Inventory Revisited

This study reassessed the profiles of traits associated with stereotypic males and females in 2009- 2010 35 years after the Bern (1974) Sex Role Inventory (BSRI) was introduced. Qualitative changes could have resulted from other cultural trends toward occupational and educational equality or growing public awareness of the nature of gender roles. The adjectives appearing in the BSRI, which produces a measure of androgyny, were rated as stereotypically male, female, or neutral by 1075 undergraduates. Chi-square tests, which assigned adjectives to genders, indicated that most of the traits formerly associated with males are now considered neutral. The characteristic \u27\u27childlike, which formerly characterized women, now characterizes men. The female\u27s stereotype was mostly unchanged although theatrical\u27\u27 appears to be added to their repertoire. There was little disagreement between the genders in the assignment of adjectives to stereotypes. Implications for the identity of American males are discussed

Function, Semantics And Pragmatics Of Evaluative Adjectives In Fictional Discourse

We constantly assess other people, objects, phenomena, and events around us. The process of evaluation is based on a set of values pertaining to an individual and on certain norms and traditions of the society. The use of certain language means expressing people's attitudes may shed light on such complex cognitive process. Evaluative adjectives are frequently used and form an integral part of the world view in conceptual and language aspects. The present paper provides the results of syntactic, semantic, functional and pragmatic peculiarities of evaluative adjectives in fiction