The Adjective: Contrastive Study in French and in Arabic
The lexical morpheme, variable in gender and number through linguistic agreement (AGR) or declension, holds a crucial position in the two ...inflected languages under examination: Arabic, an Afro-Asiatic language of the Semitic family, and French, a Romance language with synthetic characteristics. This study draws inspiration from the works of eminent linguists, including Blachère and Gaudefroy-Demombynes (1975), Béchade (1994), Al-Hakkak (1996), and others. It also incorporates insights from contrastive studies, a linguistic branch that emerged in the 1950s to enhance the teaching and learning of foreign languages by addressing language interference through the exploration of inter-linguistic structural differences. This study, designed to assist learners and translators in comprehending the affinities and deviations between French and Arabic, delves into the use of adjectives in context. It particularly focuses on the qualifying adjective as a discourse component falling within the class of apparent nouns, in contrast to implicit nouns. This lemma or lexical unit serves to describe, characterize, specify, and indicate certain properties of animate or inanimate beings. It represents the grammatical class bestowing identity upon a person, animal, or object, attaching a positive, negative, or neutral label that imparts a value judgment. In French, the qualifying adjective encompasses various types, including relational, nominal, compound, verbal, and syntagmatic. In Arabic, it takes on verbal and denominative forms, assimilated to the verb. Morphologically, French features prefixed, suffixed, and unsuffixed adjectives, while Arabic presents adjectives crafted from a multitude of forms. Regardless of the linguistic context, the qualifying adjective, matching in gender and number the noun or pronoun to which it refers, can assume multiple functions within morphosyntactic structures. It can act as an epithet, whether anteposed or postposed, with graphic, phonic, strict, or floating agreement or concord (instances of inflection), serve as an attribute linked to the subject by a copular verb, or be affixed. Additionally, qualifying adjectives can convey varying degrees of intensity using phrasal adverbs or adverbs of comparison.
In this article we propose an alternative to the theories which subdivide the adjective into three major types (qualifier, relational, adjective of the third type), themselves subdivided into several ...subclasses. We believe instead that there is only one adjectival lexeme with different uses (unitary hypothesis). To do this, we start from the two ways of looking for the adjectival prototype: on the one hand, the abstract prototype built by accumulating criteria, on the other, the semantic prototype. We examine the behavior of occurrences of the abstract prototype (admirable, monumental) and the semantic prototype (grand) with respect to gradation, the attributive function (more specifically the place of the adjective) and the predicative function. The examples show not only that the two prototype models can be reconciled, but above all that the behavior and the meaning of any adjective depend in large part on the noun it qualifies, a result which confirms our unitary hypothesis. The syntactic-semantic dependence of the adjective on the supporting substantive is such that it can be concluded that the adjective is a syncategorematic part of speech, rather than a polysemous one.
Pragmatic theories and computational models of reference must account for people's frequent use of redundant color adjectives (e.g., referring to a single triangle as "the blue triangle"). The ...standard pragmatic view holds that the informativity of a referential expression depends on pragmatic contrast: Color adjectives should be used to contrast competitors of the same kind to preempt an ambiguity (e.g., between several triangles of different colors), otherwise they are redundant. Here we propose an alternative to the standard view, the incremental efficiency hypothesis, according to which the efficiency of a referential expression must be calculated incrementally over the entire visual context. This is the first theoretical account of referential efficiency that is sensitive to the incrementality of language processing, making different cross-linguistic predictions depending on word order. Experiment 1 confirmed that English speakers produced more redundant color adjectives (e.g., "the blue triangle") than Spanish speakers (e.g., "el triángulo azul"), but both language groups used more redundant color adjectives in denser displays where it would be more efficient. In Experiments 2A and 2B, we used eye tracking to show that pragmatic contrast is not a processing constraint. Instead, incrementality and efficiency determine that English listeners establish color contrast across categories (BLUE SHAPES > TRIANGULAR ONE), whereas Spanish listeners establish color contrast within a category (TRIANGLES > BLUE ONE). Spanish listeners, however, reversed their visual search strategy when tested in English immediately after. Our results show that speakers and listeners of different languages exploit word order to increase communicative efficiency.
Das Buch bietet am exemplarischen Beispiel des Nürnberger Frühneuhochdeutschen um 1500 eine systematische historisch-synchrone Darstellung der Adjektivderivation. Die Untersuchung knüpft an die ...Arbeiten zur substantivischen (Peter O. Müller) und verbalen Wortbildung (Mechthild Habermann) des Frühneuhochdeutschen an und basiert auf einem Textcorpus, das aus den Schriften dreier Nürnberger Autoren des 15./16. Jahrhunderts besteht (Albrecht Dürer, Veit Dietrich, Heinrich Deichsler). Die Arbeit gliedert sich in einen methodisch-theoretischen Teil, der sich mit den Rahmenbedingungen und Spezifika der adjektivischen Wortbildung befasst, und einen empirischen Analyseteil. In der Wortbildungsanalyse werden zunächst die mor-phologischen Typen der Adjektivderivation, sodann die Funktionstypen und Funktionsklassen beschrieben und schließlich mit dem gegenwartssprachlichen System der Adjektivderivation verglichen. Dabei zeigt sich im Kernbereich eine weitgehende Übereinstmmung zwischen beiden Sprachperioden. Darüber hinaus lässt die diachrone Sprachentwicklung aber eine Erweiterung des Systems um die exogene Derivation sowie einen Vereinheitlichungsprozeß durch den Abbau von Konkurrenzen erkennen.
How to enable intelligent machines to possess human commonsense knowledge is one of the central concerns of artificial intelligence. Consequently, a series of commonsense knowledge bases have been ...designed and constructed by scholars. However, as an important kind of commonsense knowledge, adjective-centric commonsense knowledge (a crucial type of adjective-concept pair such as (blue, sky), (eatable, food)) is far from satisfactory due to the lack of existing knowledge bases and limited acquisition methods. In this paper, we concentrate on automatically constructing large-scale adjective-centric commonsense knowledge bases and propose an effective framework to achieve the goal. The framework mainly contains a filtering module to remove unreasonable inputs, a clustering module, and a conceptualization module to obtain adjective-concept pairs and an evaluation module to assess their plausibility. Extensive automatic and human evaluation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, and we finally harvest over 200 k adjective-centric commonsense knowledge, where 81.56% of the implicit commonsense knowledge is not covered by WebChild.11WebChild is a large-scale commonsense knowledge base, which contains triples that connect nouns with adjectives via fine-grained relations. Moreover, we also show that our mined adjective-centric commonsense knowledge can benefit the downstream query conceptualization task.
In both Romance and English literature, relational adjectives have received special attention due to their apparently idiosyncratic behaviour, as both nouns and adjectives at the same time. Stepping ...away from the usual analyses that concentrates generally on their noun-like properties, this pioneer work explains their peculiar behaviour that has so far represented a challenge for current morphological theories. Mihaela Marchis Moreno takes an empirical approach to their distribution, and the syntactic and semantic conditions that govern their use. Drawing upon key findings from previous literature she proposes a new model of how relational adjectives work both cross-linguistically, and across the various interfaces of language.
This article offers evidence, which is based on acceptability judgement tasks, in favour of the absence of unmarked linear serializations of stacked, non-coordinated adjectives in Jordanian Arabic ...(JA). Results from 16 experiments of acceptability judgements from 197 native speakers of JA point to the fact that JA places no adjective ordering. However, two factors are found to be significant. The first factor pertains to the number of stacked, non-coordinated adjectives. All possible word order patterns of different stacked adjectives are (fully) acceptable with two stacked adjectives. However, constructions with three or more stacked adjectives are significantly degraded. This is universally held, regardless of the type of the stacked adjectives (size, color, shape, etc.). We ascribe this to the third-factor effects (Chomsky in Linguist Inq 36(1):1–22, 2005) (particularly with reference to working memory and processing load) in restricting the possible number of adjectives in a given construction. A second factor relates to the syntactic position of the adjectives (attributive vs. predicative). The results reveal that attributive adjectives are significantly more acceptable than predicative adjectives (which can also be freely stacked in JA). This is also attributed to the effects of these factors favoring minimal computations. We follow O’Grady (Front Psychol 12:660296, 2021) in that the processing of across-clausal phenomena (as is the case with predicative adjectives) is more demanding than intra-clausal ones (as is the case with attributive adjectives).
There is an ongoing debate regarding the nature of narcissism such that some argue that narcissistic individuals oscillate between grandiose and vulnerable states, whereas others argue these ...dimensions are stable traits (e.g., grandiose individuals remain in grandiose states). Scales sensitive to fluctuations in narcissistic states are necessary to address this question. The current study (N = 1,613 across three samples) validates the newly developed Narcissistic Vulnerability Scale (NVS), a brief (11-item) adjective-based measure of vulnerable narcissism. Expert ratings were used for item selection. The NVS's factor structure was evaluated along with its correlations with measures of grandiose and vulnerable narcissism, five-factor model traits, and self-esteem. A subset of NVS items were also evaluated using an ecological momentary assessment design. Results indicate the NVS is a unidimensional measure of vulnerable narcissism that could be used in either trait-oriented or state-oriented analyses, the latter of which may be particularly well suited to answering the most pressing questions in the study of narcissism.
Public Significance Statement
A short adjective-based measure of vulnerable narcissism was developed. Its results are consistent with those of popular measures of trait vulnerable narcissism, but it is suitable for measuring more temporary vulnerable narcissism states. It is the first validated measure of vulnerable narcissism well suited for measuring short-term fluctuations in vulnerable narcissism.
Two experiments investigated the development of fluency in interpreting adjective–noun phrases in 30- and 36-month-old English-learning children. Using online processing measures, children’s gaze ...patterns were monitored as they heard the familiar adjective–noun phrases (e.g.
blue car) in visual contexts where the adjective was either informative (e.g. blue car paired with red car or red house) or uninformative (e.g. blue car paired with blue house). Thirty-six-month-olds processed adjective–noun phrases incrementally as adults do, orienting more quickly to the target picture on informative-adjective trials than on control trials. Thirty-month-olds did not make incremental use of informative adjectives, and experienced disruption on trials when the two potential referents were identical in kind. In the younger children, difficulty in integrating prenominal adjectives with the subsequent noun was associated with slower processing speed across conditions. These findings provide evidence that skill in putting color word knowledge to use in real-time language processing emerges gradually over the third year.
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