The article considers the descriptive attribute ‘perfect’ and its derivatives as a commonly used abstraction for creating persuasive emotional texts that encourage potential customers to make ...purchases and satisfy their needs. The study analyses the objects of reference, semantic field, and syntactic functions of the concept through the prism of its functioning in promotional brochures devoted to passenger automobiles belonging to 44 brands. The material included 115 brochures over the previous decade, 22,000 words of minimal contexts and 520 contextual occurrences of ‘perfect’ and its derivatives. The obtained results show that ‘perfect’ tends to reveal two meanings – excellence and compliance to a standard – which historically go back to its original meaning in Latin ‘per factum’ (made thoroughly). Over the period of the decade, there has been a shift from idealisation to practicality in the automotive industry under the influence of economic and environmental factors. The semantic mapping of contextual associative adjectives also indicates that ‘perfect’ is currently more oriented to highlighting practical utility of the cars rather than their excellence. In effect, such practical aspects as technological advancement, technicality, customisation, reliability, comfort, dynamics, style, noiselessness, sound, and price outnumber abstract qualities which express positive impressions, elevation, idealisation, and exaggeration of relevance, by 30%. Semantically, the concept ‘perfection’ follows the promotional principle of combining rational and emotional arguments. ‘Perfect’ is applicable to any car part – be it the exterior, interior or engine. The derivational paradigm has no limitations in syntactic distribution; however, in promotional discourse it typically occurs in nominative structures. The results contribute to the theoretical development of the linguistic worldview through the lens of valuable marketing concepts and can be practically useful in training professional writing skills to students specialising in PR and advertising and learning English for specific purposes.
Contrastive analysis of descriptive adjective hra bar - a, - o in Montenegrin and descriptive adjective brave as well as their near synonyms in English and Montenegrin will be employed in this paper ...in order to prove the presence of the descriptive adjectives' prevailing idiomatic meaning in both languages. The results of the analysis indicate that the semantic (and grammatical) aspects of words are reflected onto and within their collocational framework. Furthermore, it is expected that the collocational framework of the adjective hrabar - a, - o in Montenegrin will change depending upon the grammatical gender implied (masculine, feminine, neutral), as well as the sequence of its near synonyms. The same changes are not expected to occur in English due to its lack of grammatical gender. The methodology of the rese arch comprises the frequency of the primary and idiomatic meaning analyses of descriptive adjective hrabar, - a, - o, and its near synonyms based on the framework of the Contemporary Serbian language electronic corpus, (Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Scien ces, University of Belgrade), and the descriptive adjective brave and its near synonyms analyzed on the British National Corpus data (BNC) and the Words Bank: English database.
As the state-denoting meaning of its first component gets more and more bleached, nowadays the disyllabic descriptive adjective has transmuted into a gradable adjective. However, the state-denoting ...meaning of the first component does not totally die out; the disyllabic descriptive adjective, therefore, can only occur with some specific type of degree modifiers. So, the conflict between the assumption made by previous studies like Zhu (1980) that adjectives able to undergo reduplication must be gradable and the observation made by them that disyllabic descriptive adjectives cannot occur with any degree adverb can be solved. For the disyllabic descriptive adjective, the reduplication morphology functions to revive the degree operator function of the first component and make it able to bind and saturate the degree argument of the second component. This distinguishes the disyllabic descriptive adjective from the disyllabic attributive adjective in the reduplication pattern.
This paper discusses three linguistic concepts (category, function, sense) generally
attributed to gentilicios (i.e. names given in Spanish to the people from a particular
place). According to their ...behaviour, gentilicios lend themselves to classification both as
adjectives and as nouns. All gentilicios, including those that denote human beings and
those that denote non-human beings or entities, can function as adjectives or nouns.
However, on a scale ranging from the adjective pole to the noun pole the behaviour
of gentilicios is closer to adjectives. Of the two main types of adjectives (relational and descriptive ones), gentilicios fall systematically within the relational type. Nevertheless, a
substantial amount of relational adjectives are susceptible to descriptive use. As for the
two main functions of adjectives (attributive and predicative positions), we can conclude
that gentilicios function primarily as predicative adjectives and secondarily as attributive
adjectives. When in predicative position, the most common sub-function of gentilicios
is specification. By virtue of this function the noun modified by a relational gentilicio is
located in a specific place in the world. Finally, I will analyse the semantic properties of
gentilicios. The most common senses of relational gentilicios are identification and classification,
but when used as descriptive adjectives, gentilicios can be interpreted as expressing
analogy.
En este trabajo nos planteamos la atribución de tres conceptos lingüísticos a los gentilicios:
categoría, función y sentido. El comportamiento de los gentilicios da pie para
su consideración como adjetivos y como sustantivos; todos los gentilicios, tanto los que
designan persona como los que designan no-persona pueden funcionar como adjetivos
y como sustantivos, pero en la escala que va del adjetivo al sustantivo está más cerca de
la categoría adjetivo. De los dos tipos de adjetivos, calificativo y relacional, el gentilicio
se halla sistemáticamente dentro del relacional; aunque una gran parte de los adjetivos
relacionales admiten el deslizamiento hacia su uso como calificativos. De las dos funciones
básicas, atributo y adjunto, del adjetivo, debemos afirmar que funcionan primariamente
como adjuntos y derivadamente como atributos. Como adjunto, su subfunción más pertinente
es la especificación; es esta la que «sitúa» al sustantivo en el lugar del mundo que
le corresponde, por adjetivo relacional. Cuestión distinta es el sentido del gentilicio; en su
cualidad de relacional sus sentidos más habituales son el identificador y el clasificador, pero
en su deslizamiento hacia el tipo calificativo, su sentido es analógico.
Higuchi, Shoji, & Hatayama (2002) selected nine sense-descriptive adjectives (eg, sweet, clear) to describe the olfactory properties of fragrances. In order to clarify the ability of these adjectives ...to classify fragrances, the present study used a non-verbal sorting of fragrances that has been widely accepted in previous studies as a method of classifying fragrance. Interfragrance similarities obtained from the non-verbal sorting were then compared with those obtained from the adjective rating based on a two-dimensional spatial configuration of fragrances created by a multidimensional scaling (MDS) analysis. The similarities of the two MDS configurations, obtained from the verbal & non-verbal sorting, were estimated by the correlation of interfragrance distances on the spatial configuration. The correlation coefficient was 0.61, indicating that the ability of the sense-descriptive adjectives to classify fragrances is nearly the same as that of the non-verbal sorting. 2 Tables, 2 Figures, 29 References. Adapted from the source document
: Higuchi, Shoji, and Hatayama (2002) selected nine sense‐descriptive adjectives (e.g., sweet, clear) to describe the olfactory properties of fragrances. In order to clarify the ability of these ...adjectives to classify fragrances, the present study used a non‐verbal sorting of fragrances that has been widely accepted in previous studies as a method of classifying fragrance. Interfragrance similarities obtained from the non‐verbal sorting were then compared with those obtained from the adjective rating based on a two‐dimensional spatial configuration of fragrances created by a multidimensional scaling (MDS) analysis. The similarities of the two MDS configurations, obtained from the verbal and non‐verbal sorting, were estimated by the correlation of interfragrance distances on the spatial configuration. The correlation coefficient was 0.61, indicating that the ability of the sense‐descriptive adjectives to classify fragrances is nearly the same as that of the non‐verbal sorting.
This dataset contains 2,818 trait descriptive adjectives in English and information about the extent to which each term is known among a large and approximately representative sample of U.S. adults. ...The list of personality-related terms includes all 1,710 adjectives previously studied by Goldberg (1982) and draws on prior work by Allport and Odbert (1936) and Norman (1967). The extent to which terms were known by respondents was based on the administration of vocabulary questions about each term-definition pair online to a sample of English-speaking U.S. residents with approximately average literacy levels. The open data are accompanied by an online database that allows the terms to be searched and filtered.
This article is an analysis of the various uses of the qualifying adjective nice : as an attributive adjective standing alone in front of the head noun, or completed by a PP : with NP or of NP ; as a ...predicative adjective, and it is then compared with the predicative NP a nice N. It is here argued that the predicative APs nice and nice with NP are both stage level predicates (SLP), while the predicative AP nice of NP and the predicative NP a nice N are individual level predicates (ILP). Paradoxically, the latter ILP predicate − i.e. a nice N as subject complement− is then shown to be sometimes compatible with an NP-subject whose head noun is postmodified by an eventive relative clause. It is also claimed that the construction « NP is a nice N » can have three different readings : an intersective one in which nice qualifies the NP-subject ; more often a subsective reading in which nice qualifies the head noun of the predicative NP ; or a double reading, when the subsective reading does not exclude an additional intersective one.
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