Adjective Order Research Articles

The Impact of L1 Transfer on Learning English Adjective Order by Saudi EFL Learners

The Impact of L1 Transfer on Learning English Adjective Order by Saudi EFL Learners

German-Danish or Danish-German? – A study of nationality adjectives in hyphenated compounds

This study is an explicitly comparative linguistic analysis of attributive collocations with nationality adjectives in hyphenated compounds with dansk ‘Danish’ and deutsch ‘German’ as first or second element. In cultural studies of identity, migration, and minorities, as well as in Danish and German media debates, hyphenated compounds continuously raise questions: Could meaning be attributed to the hyphen? Is the first element separated from, connected with, or subordinated to the second element by the hyphen – or vice versa? The present study seeks to explore whether the order of national adjectives in hyphenated compounds carry meaning. The base word nouns are examined to see whether there are semantic differences between nouns modified by nationality adjectives with interchangeable order or fixed order. The study’s premise is that linguistic fixity and conventionality reflect fixed “Denkmuster” (‘patterns of thought’, Stein & Stumpf 2019, 193), also in collocations. The two Sketch Engine corpora, daTenTen20 and deTenTen18, serve as the empirical basis for the comparison. The study shows that quantitatively there is a clear preference for deutsch- or dansk- as the first element, but no general semantic differences can be observed between base words following compounds with adjectives in interchangeable order and those following compounds with adjectives in fixed order.

‘Long’, ‘flat’, ‘round’, ‘hard’, ‘heavy’, ‘sharp’

Abstract Cognitive linguists have not paid much attention to the conceptual semantics of basic adjectives used predicatively about physical objects, concentrating mainly on attributive constructions (e.g., adjective ordering, interactions between adjective and noun) or on figurative uses. Among the exceptions are Anna Wierzbicka (2006) on ‘shape’ descriptors and Goddard & Wierzbicka (2007) on ‘physical quality’ descriptors, both conducted within the NSM framework of semantic-conceptual analysis. Building on this work, the present article proposes original semantic-conceptual explications for the basic physical meanings of ‘long’, ‘flat’, ‘round’, ‘hard’, ‘heavy’, and ‘sharp’. The project has high significance because it can be argued that these meanings function as conceptual building blocks in the semantics of innumerable other words and concepts in the realm of the physical. The article showcases cutting-edge work in NSM semantics, including introducing the notion of ‘visuospatial parsing’ into NSM research and emphasizing the importance of embodied experience in human conceptualization.

Acquisition of prenominal adjective order by Jordanian EFL learners

This study investigates how Jordanian EFL learners manage to learn the order of English prenominal adjectives, shedding light on learners’ cognitive processes and the possible impact of their first language. It focuses on two-, three- and four-adjective sequences to identify the areas of difficulty and their sources. The authors of the present study relied on their experience. They referred to some experts in Arabic grammar to compare the students’ order of English prenominal adjectives with the order of Arabic adjectives to inform the degree of their mother tongue's influence. A test based on the order of prenominal adjectives suggested by Svatko (1979) was used for data collection to achieve the study objectives. The study participants were 42 Jordanian advanced EFL undergraduate students at Al-Hussein Bin Talal University in Jordan. The study results revealed that Jordanian EFL learners encounter great difficulties in using prenominal adjectives, especially as the complexity of sequences increases. The overall percentage of correct answers across all categories is 35%. The results also showed that intralingual errors outweighed interlingual errors, scoring 77%.

Nominal-phrase premodifications by non-native English speakers: The case of attributive adjective word order of Saudi EFL students at tertiary level

English nominal premodifications such as adjective word order have piqued the interest of researchers in recent years due to their learning difficulty for all language learners regardless of their linguistic backgrounds. Non-native English speakers like EFL students may find this case challenging. In light of this, the current study sought to ascertain the difficulty level of Saudi EFL students in recognising the natural order of English attributive adjectives, taking into account the most challenging order sequence, gender, and language proficiency levels. To accomplish this main objective, a designed pronominal adjective test was developed and carried out on 139 Saudi undergraduate EFL students who were purposively recruited for this study. According to the findings, Saudi EFL students had varying degrees of difficulty recognising the natural English adjective word order. While 66.2% of students had moderate difficulty choosing the appropriate adjective sequence, only 15.1% and 18.7% of participants had low and high difficulty, respectively. The most difficult was nominal premodifications with four modifiers, followed by three and two modifiers. When there were only two modifiers, most participants correctly identified incorrect adjective word ordering and provided corrections. When more modifiers existed, the percentages decreased, and the difficulty level increased. Proficiency language level and gender statistically significant differences were also discovered. Although the former revealed no differences, the latter had differences in favour of males, implying that females performed better in the test than males. Based on these findings, limitations and future research directions were proposed.

Adjective Order and Adnominal Modification in Naasioi

This squib presents new data involving adjective orders that are problematic for analyses of adjectives as merged in the specifiers of fixed sequences of functional heads. Evidence is presented from Naasioi to suggest that adjectives in this language are freely ordered within the DP, both with respect to other adjectives and also with respect to the noun they modify. It is argued that the Naasioi data are incompatible not only with the analysis of attributive adjectives as occupying the specifier of functional heads, but also with the hierarchy that is assumed to underlie this ordering.

An Error Analysis in Using Adjective Order at English Education Study Program Students of IAIN Manado

This study aims to determine the proportion (frequency and percentage) of errors and dominant errors in the composition of adjectives. This study focused on the analysis of misordering errors based on the Surface Strategy Taxonomy by Dulay in the use of adjective order. The research methodology in this study was a quantitative descriptive method. The respondents of this study were 20 second semester students of the English Education Study Program at the Manado State Institute of Islamic Studies with the academic year 2021/2022. The researcher used a test as an instrument to collect data. The following test was in the form of; Rearrange Words and Multiple Choices. In the meantime, the data analysis procedure applied in this study was collecting a sample, identifying error based on the sequence of adjectives by Frank theory, describing the results, and evaluating the errors. The research findings show that students at second semester of English Education Study Program have errors to identify the appropriate order of adjectives in the sentence. In addition, researcher found that there were 520 frequencies of misordering errors with an error percentage of 50.0%. Rearrange words test have 272 frequency of errors (52.3%) and Multiple Choices test have 248 frequency of error (47.7%). In short, the dominant error based on the test is Rearrange words, with a total misordering error which is 272 errors and its’ percentage 52.3%. The most dominant errors in adjective order item is Shape with a total frequency of 52 out of 80 total errors with 13% error percentage. The research implications is students can be aware in using more adjectives with correct ordering especially when use adjective shape.

Systematic testing of three Language Models reveals low language accuracy, absence of response stability, and a yes-response bias.

Humans are universally good in providing stable and accurate judgments about what forms part of their language and what not. Large Language Models (LMs) are claimed to possess human-like language abilities; hence, they are expected to emulate this behavior by providing both stable and accurate answers, when asked whether a string of words complies with or deviates from their next-word predictions. This work tests whether stability and accuracy are showcased by GPT-3/text-davinci-002, GPT-3/text-davinci-003, and ChatGPT, using a series of judgment tasks that tap on 8 linguistic phenomena: plural attraction, anaphora, center embedding, comparatives, intrusive resumption, negative polarity items, order of adjectives, and order of adverbs. For every phenomenon, 10 sentences (5 grammatical and 5 ungrammatical) are tested, each randomly repeated 10 times, totaling 800 elicited judgments per LM (total n = 2,400). Our results reveal variable above-chance accuracy in the grammatical condition, below-chance accuracy in the ungrammatical condition, a significant instability of answers across phenomena, and a yes-response bias for all the tested LMs. Furthermore, we found no evidence that repetition aids the Models to converge on a processing strategy that culminates in stable answers, either accurate or inaccurate. We demonstrate that the LMs' performance in identifying (un)grammatical word patterns is in stark contrast to what is observed in humans (n = 80, tested on the same tasks) and argue that adopting LMs as theories of human language is not motivated at their current stage of development.

A Corpus-Based Study of the Order of Adjectives in Japanese Antonym Sequences: The Role of Markedness and Frequency

Abstract This study investigates whether the order of adjectives in antonym pairs (e.g., ii ‘good, warui ‘bad’) in single sentences of Japanese follows principles of markedness and whether the more frequently used antonym is more likely to be used first. Based on data collected from the Tsukuba Web Corpus, the results of the study were that both markedness and frequency equally influence the order of antonym pairs. This study suggests that markedness plays a role in determining the ordering of adjectives in antonym pairs. Additionally, it was found that markedness affects the order in terms of factors of positivity and magnitude.

Evaluating a Century of Progress on the Cognitive Science of Adjective Ordering

AbstractThe literature on adjective ordering abounds with proposals meant to account for why certain adjectives appear before others in multi-adjective strings (e.g., the small brown box). However, these proposals have been developed and tested primarily in isolation and based on English; few researchers have looked at the combined performance of multiple factors in the determination of adjective order, and few have evaluated predictors across multiple languages. The current work approaches both of these objectives by using technologies and datasets from natural language processing to look at the combined performance of existing proposals across 32 languages. Comparing this performance with both random and idealized baselines, we show that the literature on adjective ordering has made significant meaningful progress across its many decades, but there remains quite a gap yet to be explained.

Learning speaker-specific linguistic ‘style’ is mediated by deviance from common language use

AbstractDifferent speakers sometimes convey similar meanings differently. This study examined whether listeners could learn to associate a specific linguistic ‘style’ with a certain speaker, with no apparent difference in meaning, and the role of unnatural linguistic choices (or unexpectedness) in such learning. We created an inter-speaker variation in ‘style’ using the weak adjective ordering preferences in Hebrew. Participants were exposed to two different speakers, each producing a different adjective order, consistently. We manipulated the combinations of order pairings, based on their naturalness (with two natural orders, a natural and an unnatural order, and two unnatural orders), and examined participants’ ability to associate a unique order with a specific speaker. In two experiments, using different statistical analyses, we show that listeners can learn speaker-specific language use when it is irrelevant for meaning inferences, when deviance from natural or expected language use is involved. We further discuss whether learning may be facilitated by differences in naturalness or structural form. Our findings suggest that listeners are sensitive to inter-speaker variability in ‘style’, mostly when this ‘style’ is unexpected. This is in line with the predictions of Surprisal theory, and may suggest that surprisal plays a major role in learning speaker-specific language use.

Mastering English Multiple Adjectives Ordering among Early versus Late Second Language Speakers: Evidence from Arabic-English Bilinguals

Recent research has shown that learners demonstrate huge variability in second language (L2) end-state attainment. While some L2 learners attain native-like command, others only attain an undeveloped command and some stuck in between. It is also assumed that early learners often surpass owing to Lenneberg’s Critical Period Hypothesis (1967) that proposes that early onset often advance L2 development. This study investigates the extent to which, age is associated with mastering the target language among late versus early Arabic-English bilinguals. Specifically, this study concerns itself with the issue of how Arabic-English bilinguals typically perceive the right ordering of multiple consecutive adjectives (e.g., the small yellow bird). A considerable amount of literature has established that L2 learners encounter challenges in mastering the right sequence of adjectives, particularly when there are several adjectives modifying a single noun. To determine how Arabic-learners of English perceive English descriptive adjective orderings, this study observes whether an earlier age of first contact with English enhances the learners’ accuracy and the reaction time. To test this assumption, the intuitions of two groups of early (n=8) vs. late (n=8) Arabic-English bilinguals in the United Kingdom (i.e. Leeds) were compared for English descriptive adjective ordering preferences through a Speeded Acceptability Judgment Task (SAJT). The participants were requested to show their ordering preferences for a couple of multi-adjective strings (n=16). The findings suggested that early Arabic-English bilinguals significantly outperformed late Arabic-English bilinguals in terms of exhibiting native-like ordering preferences. The study concludes that early exposure is more likely to facilitate mastering the target system and that it generally accelerates L2 development. This study also concludes that accuracy and response time may reflect the L2 development. The study suggests a number of pedogeological implications for teaching and learning an L2.

No Adjective Ordering Preferences in Jordanian Arabic Grammar.

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).

The Placement of Adjectives in Pashto with Regard to their Change in Meaning

This paper examines Pashto adjectives to delineate their placement and order with respect to their morphological change and modification of meaning. The aim of this paper is to address the occurrence of Pashto adjectives at the initial, middle, and final positions at the sentence level. Furthermore, the main focus in these occurrences is to find the prenominal initial, prenominal middle, postnominal middle, and final positions of Pashto adjectives at the sentence level. For doing this, the researchers collected data from native speakers and focused on adjectives and their use in sentences. They also read different written materials and found adjectives at various positions. The finding of the study showed that three adjective orders are correct and normal in Pashto, including prenominal initial, prenominal middle, and postnominal medial adjective orders. The results also showed that the postnominal position of an adjective is rarely found in spoken, but not in written at the final position of a sentence. In addition to it, the postnominal adjective of Pashto brings emphasis to the sentence, causes incorrect syntactic order, and also affects the meaning of the sentence.

Errors in Using Order of Adjectives in Writing Descriptive Text

ABSTRACT
 writing is one of skills in learning English besides reading, writing and speaking skill. Writing is an activity write that it needs to express thought and feeling in written form. Most of students often make errors in their writing and they still do not understand in using order adjective in sentences grammatically. The objective is to increase students’ comprehension in using order adjective in writing descriptive text. The errors make by students has some reasons; firstly, they have lack of motivation from themselves, they do not interest in learning writing and the material presentation is not comfortable. Secondly, first language or mother tongue can influence the language or language interference. Thirdly, translation use in first language sentences word by word, it occurs to change of the meaning in a sentence. Therefore, to solve the students’ errors in writing descriptive text, the students have to know order adjective like; quantity, opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material and purpose. So, they can write sentence in a paragraph grammatically and regularly.

The interplay between syntactic and non-syntactic structure in language production

Speakers frequently reuse earlier encountered structures. A long-standing view in language production research is that this structural priming is driven by the persistence of abstract syntax, independent from unordered, conceptual representations. However, evidence has been building that non-syntactic information can also influence structural choice. Here we examined whether and how the syntactic priming of relative clause structures might interact with the priming of the conceptual category order of adjectives in noun phrase production. Study 1 found that speakers are more likely to produce relative clause structures (spotted bow that’s green) after having heard relative clause structures (striped lock that’s blue) as opposed to an alternative structure (striped blue lock), and they also tended to repeat the conceptual order of the prime, with more pattern-first orders after pattern-first primes than after color-first primes. Critically, we found larger syntactic priming when the conceptual order of the prime persisted more in the target and larger conceptual order priming when the syntactic structure of the prime persisted more in the target. Studies 2 and 3 found that conceptual category order priming can be enhanced by adjective overlap as well as noun overlap between prime and target, whereas syntactic priming can only be enhanced by noun overlap. These results supported the interactive priming account: Although the syntactic structure and the conceptual order are represented at different levels and hence can be activated independently, the link between them is also primed, which enhances priming at both levels.

Adjective Ordering Across Languages

Adjective ordering preferences stand as perhaps one of the best candidates for a true linguistic universal: When multiple adjectives are strung together in service of modifying some noun, speakers of different languages—from English to Mandarin to Hebrew—exhibit robust and reliable preferences concerning the relative order of those adjectives. More importantly, despite the diversity of the languages investigated, the very same preferences surface over and over again. This tantalizing regularity has led to decades of research pursuing the source of these preferences. This article offers an overview of the findings and proposals that have resulted.

On English Order of Adjectives

This paper investigates an important subject in English; that is “the correct order of adjectives in front of a noun in a noun phrase”. If the learners of English wants to speak and write like a native speaker, they must avoid using wrong order of adjectives which sounds ackward and odd for native listeners. The investigator of this article views that this research can be regarded as an important chance to improve the learners’ ability in understanding this aspect of English grammar because the research will show you how to list adjectives in the correct order, which will make you sound more natural when you speak.

Rapid adaptation of predictive models during language comprehension: Aperiodic EEG slope, individual alpha frequency and idea density modulate individual differences in real-time model updating.

Predictive coding provides a compelling, unified theory of neural information processing, including for language. However, there is insufficient understanding of how predictive models adapt to changing contextual and environmental demands and the extent to which such adaptive processes differ between individuals. Here, we used electroencephalography (EEG) to track prediction error responses during a naturalistic language processing paradigm. In Experiment 1, 45 native speakers of English listened to a series of short passages. Via a speaker manipulation, we introduced changing intra-experimental adjective order probabilities for two-adjective noun phrases embedded within the passages and investigated whether prediction error responses adapt to reflect these intra-experimental predictive contingencies. To this end, we calculated a novel measure of speaker-based, intra-experimental surprisal (“speaker-based surprisal”) as defined on a trial-by-trial basis and by clustering together adjectives with a similar meaning. N400 amplitude at the position of the critical second adjective was used as an outcome measure of prediction error. Results showed that N400 responses attuned to speaker-based surprisal over the course of the experiment, thus indicating that listeners rapidly adapt their predictive models to reflect local environmental contingencies (here: the probability of one type of adjective following another when uttered by a particular speaker). Strikingly, this occurs in spite of the wealth of prior linguistic experience that participants bring to the laboratory. Model adaptation effects were strongest for participants with a steep aperiodic (1/f) slope in resting EEG and low individual alpha frequency (IAF), with idea density (ID) showing a more complex pattern. These results were replicated in a separate sample of 40 participants in Experiment 2, which employed a highly similar design to Experiment 1. Overall, our results suggest that individuals with a steep aperiodic slope adapt their predictive models most strongly to context-specific probabilistic information. Steep aperiodic slope is thought to reflect low neural noise, which in turn may be associated with higher neural gain control and better cognitive control. Individuals with a steep aperiodic slope may thus be able to more effectively and dynamically reconfigure their prediction-related neural networks to meet current task demands. We conclude that predictive mechanisms in language are highly malleable and dynamic, reflecting both the affordances of the present environment as well as intrinsic information processing capabilities of the individual.

SIFAT SIRALAMALARI ÜZERİNDE YENİ BİR KISITLAMA

Bu yazıda sıfat sıralamaları ile ilgili yeni bir genelleme ortaya atılmakta ve bu genellemenin Son-üstü-Son Kısıtı tarafından açıklanabileği gösterilmektedir.
 Yazıda ilk olarak Son-üstü-Son Kısıtı betimlenmekte ve bu kısıtın açıklayıcı gücüne örnekler verilmektedir. Daha sonra sıfatlar ile ilgili bazı gözlemler ışığında sıfatların dizimi ile ilgili iki analiz sunulmaktadır: (a) bitiştirme analizi ve (b) işlevsel baş analizi. Yazının sonraki bölümünde sıfat sıralamaları üzerinde adına Sıfat Sırası Genellemesi denilen bir kısıtlamanın var olduğu savunulmaktadır. Son olarak sıfatların işlevsel baş analizi varsayıldığında Sıfat Sırası Genellemesinin Son-üstü-Son Kısıtının sonuçlarından biri olarak ele alınabileceği gösterilmektedir. Yazı, Son-üstü-Son Kısıtının neden geçerli olduğunu açıklayan dizim-temelli bir analizin betimlenmesiyle sona ermektedir.