Modifiers In English Research Articles

A Typological Approach to Word Order and Information Processing: English as a SVO Language

The main purpose of this study is to examine a relation between word order and language processing and identify language-specific features that affect the degree of accessibility to information structure in a SVO word order. The findings from this study reveal that subject-prominent mechanisms in English, such as clefting structures, dummy subjects, existential sentences, non-agentive subjects, raising constructions, and passive voices, are well motivated for the purpose of maximizing language-use efficiency. In addition, passive constructions and non-agentive subjects are strategically exploited for the purpose of promoting high accessibility to a rigid SVO sequence and improving textual coherence. Furthermore, the tendency towards short–long ordering in SVO languages like English is predominant, and thus the language-specific maxims, such as ‘end-focus’, ‘end-weight’, and ‘dependency length minimization’, are well observed in the use of left-branching and right-branching modifiers in English for the purpose of increasing the efficiency of information processing. Finally, this study suggests that the language-specific structures, patterns, devices, or principles that are available in SVO word order seem to be optimized for facilitating information processing.

Comparing the Order of Multi-Layered Modifiers in English, Chinese and Vietnamese in Language Teaching

From the cross-linguistic perspective and cognitive linguistic theory, this study has analysed the rules of multi-layered modifiers in English, Chinese, and Vietnamese, pointing out their common points and differences. Although all three languages belong to the SVO (subject-verb-object) type but modifiers in English and Chinese are in front of the core words, which shows that English and Chinese belong to the language in the left branch, but modifiers in Vietnamese, they are behind the core words which shows that Vietnamese belongs to the right branch. All the three languages have one thing in common, whether they are on the left or on the right branch, in which modifiers have the closest relationship with the core words that will stand nearest to them. Other modifiers that have a non-intimate relationship with the core words will stand further away from them. Thus, mastering this feature of the three types of languages will help in language teaching and learning.

On the (non-)equivalence of constructions with determiner genitives and noun modifiers in English

The question of equivalence of constructions with determiner genitives (the FBI's director,the chair's leg) and noun modifiers (the FBI director,the chair leg) is a crucial one for Rosenbach's (2007a, 2010) approach to the gradience between genitive and noun + noun constructions as well as for any study of grammatical variation treating the two constructions as syntactic variants (Szmrecsanyiet al. 2016). However, the assumption that there is such equivalence has recently been challenged by Breban (2018) for English and Schlücker (2013, 2018) for German. The present article defends the view that determiner genitives and identifying noun modifiers are sufficiently similar to alternate in certain choice contexts from a variationist perspective, which, as will be shown, proceeds from a notion of equivalence different from the one adopted by in-depth semantic–pragmatic studies. Proper noun modifiers take a prominent role among identifying noun modifiers in their ability to alternate with determiner genitives, but the argument and analysis in this article is not restricted to them.

Language Transformation in Interpretation Between Chinese and English

There exist huge differences between Chinese and English, particularly in terms of syntactic structures. In order to have a good transformation between these two languages, interpreters should know the differences and apply the knowledge in the interpretation process. With specific examples, this paper explores the differences between these two languages in the following aspects: hypotaxis in English Vs. parataxis in Chinese; subject-prominent structure in English Vs. topic-prominent structure in Chinese; Preposition of modifiers in Chinese Vs. Postposition of modifiers in English; passive voice in English Vs. active voice in Chinese; compound sentences and complex sentences; cultural context differences between English and Chinese.

Variability and consistency in late bilinguals’ morphology

Abstract Speaking a late-learned second language (L2) is supposed to yield more variable and less consistent output than speaking one’s first language (L1), particularly with respect to reliably adhering to grammatical morphology. The current study investigates both internal processes involved in encoding morphologically complex words – by recording event-related brain potentials (ERPs) during participants’ silent productions – and the corresponding overt output. We specifically examined compounds with plural or singular modifiers in English. Thirty-one advanced L2 speakers of English (L1: German) were compared to a control group of 20 L1 English speakers from an earlier study. We found an enhanced (right-frontal) negativity during (silent) morphological encoding for compounds produced from regular plural forms relative to compounds formed from irregular plurals, replicating the ERP effect obtained for the L1 group. The L2 speakers’ overt productions, however, were significantly less consistent than those of the L1 speakers on the same task. We suggest that L2 speakers employ the same mechanisms for morphological encoding as L1 speakers, but with less reliance on grammatical constraints than L1 speakers.

Clausal modifiers in noun phrases: A comparison of English and Norwegian based on the Oslo Multilingual Corpus

The structure of the noun phrase has many common features in English and Norwegian. One feature shared by the two languages is that noun phrases often contain clausal postmodifiers. However, there are marked differences in the types of clauses occurring: Postmodifying clauses in Norwegian tend to be finite relative clauses, while in English there is much more variation, connected with the general fact that -ing clauses and past-participle clauses are common non-finite alternatives in that language, in addition to infinitive clauses. These all tend to be less explicit modifiers than relative clauses, in terms of both their semantic content and their syntactic structure. The study reported in this article confirms that Norwegian noun phrases are often characterised by a higher degree of explicitness than corresponding English ones. A major finding is a tendency for information which is expressed by clausal noun-phrase modifiers in English to be expressed by other means in Norwegian, sometimes outside the same noun phrase, which can often be seen as the extreme case of explicitness. The study is based on an investigation of corresponding noun phrases in the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus (ENPC), part of the Oslo Multilingual Corpus. In an attempt to offset the impact of individual translators’ preferences, the Multiple-translation Corpus, consisting of ten different Norwegian translations of each of two English Original texts, is also examined.

Sortal, Relational, and Functional Interpretations of Nouns and Russian Container Constructions

Among the semantic types that nouns can take on, functional types are the smallest class, and functional nouns are probably not a linguistically distinct subcategory, paceLöbner (1985). But there are some interesting constructions specific to functional nouns, of which we discuss three, devoting most attention to the third. The three are (i) parameter-headed NPs as modifiers in English, as in a dress that length (Partee 1986), (ii) a construction in Russian known as Genitive with Obligatory Third Term (Borschev & Knorina 1990), similar to English person of medium height, *person of height and (iii) Russian Genitive of Measure construction(s), illustrated by stakan moloka ‘glass of milk’, involving a quantity of substance contained in a container. We describe a series of meaning-shifts that lead from the concrete container-noun to its use as a pure (functional) measure term. The main theoretical concerns here are these meaning shifts and the question of how many distinct senses need to be recognized. We close with some observations on the relation between linguistic and non-linguistic aspects of the natural-language metaphysics of containers.

Boundedness and relativity

It is often assumed that relative adjectives (e.g. ‘long’, ‘old’) evoke unbounded scales and are, therefore, incompatible with maximizers (e.g. ‘completely’) and approximators (e.g. ‘almost’). In contrast, absolute adjectives which are felicitous with maximizers (e.g. ‘completely full’) and approximators (e.g. ‘almost full’) are argued to trigger bounded scales. This paper investigates whether the semantic typology of gradable adjectives developed for Germanic languages can be extended to non-Germanic languages by comparing the distribution of relative adjectives with totality modifiers in English and Russian corpora. In line with previous research, the corpus analysis shows that English relative adjectives are associated with fully unbounded scales and are very infrequent in combination with maximizers and approximators. In contrast, Russian relative adjectives evoke half-bounded scales. Therefore, relative adjectives denoting less of a property (e.g. korotkij “short”, dešëvyj “cheap”) are quite frequently modified by maximizing adverbs in Russian. However, unlike maximum-standard absolute adjectives, Russian relative adjectives are incompatible with approximators. It is concluded that there is no universal one-to-one relationship between adjective types and scale types.

Promiscuous Modification and Cross-Categorial Scale Structure

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Emerging variation: determiner genitives and noun modifiers in English

This article discusses the emerging variation between determiner genitives and noun modifiers in Present-day English. Based on the results of corpus analyses and previous studies I show that this variation (1) was not present in earlier English, and (2) results from the fact that determiner genitives have come to be used with nouns low in animacy while noun modifiers have come to be used with nouns high in animacy (mainly) in the course of Modern English. This semantic shift (or rather ‘convergence’) of genitives and noun modifiers has helped to create contexts which are compatible with both determiner and classifier function, i.e. the functions typically expressed by determiner genitives and noun modifiers, respectively. The article complements earlier work on the gradience between s-genitive constructions and noun+noun constructions (Rosenbach, 2006a), providing fur-ther evidence for the claim that semantic overlap may give rise to constructional gradience.

Finding the right words in the study abroad context: The development of German learners' use of external modifiers in English

This paper examines the pragmatic development of nine German university students in a study abroad context over the period of one academic year. The investigation focuses on learners' ability to soften the illocutionary force of request utterances by employing a range of external modifiers. Data for the present investigation were elicited at three distinct points of the learners' sojourn in the target language environment: shortly after their arrival, in the middle of their stay and shortly before they returned home to Germany. The data were collected with the help of the Multimedia Elicitation Task (MET) which had been specifically designed for the present study. The MET is a computer based instrument that contains 16 request scenarios. The study examines whether learners varied the use of external modifiers according to the status of their interlocutors and/or the imposition of the request. It also investigates whether their choice of modifiers over time seems to have been influenced by exposure to their L2 in the study abroad context by comparing the data of the German learners of English in England to data collected from 13 German learners of English in Germany with no study abroad experience and also to 15 British English native speakers.

The Use of Modifying Terms in the Naming and Categorization of Color Appearances in Vietnamese and English

AbstractCross-cultural studies of color naming show that basic terms are universally the most frequently used to name colors. However, such basic color terms are always used in the context of larger linguistic systems when specific properties of color experience are described. To investigate naturalistic naming behaviors, we examined the use of modifiers in English and Vietnamese color naming using an unconstrained naming task (Jameson & Alvarado, in press). Monolingual and bilingual subjects named a representative set of 110 color stimuli sampled from a commonly used color-order stimulus space. Results revealed greater reliance upon polylexemic naming among monolingual Vietnamese speakers and greater use of monolexemic basic hue terms and secondary terms (object glosses) among monolingual English speakers. Systematic differences across these language groups imply that widely used monolexemic naming methods may differentially impact color-naming findings in cross-cultural investigations of color cognition.

Measuring retrospective annoyance in field studies: Prerequisites, procedures, and problems

The definition and measurement of annoyance varies between studies. This paper is concerned mainly with measurement topics, e.g., graphical versus magnitude estimations or verbal scales; the effect of mentioning frames of reference with respect to (a) exposure time, (b) exposure area, or (c) range of possible degrees of annoyance/exposure. With verbal response scales, the number of response steps varies between 2 and 7; some studies simply provide for categorical judgments, others provide for nearly equidistant verbal steps—in order to allow for parametric treatments of data. In this context, an international study is reported which intended to gain comparable response scales for different languages. The decision criteria used for selecting 5 steps on the total range between the lowest and the highest possible degree of annoyance are discussed, and the use of certain verbal modifiers in English, German, and French are proposed. Together with instructions for mentioning the frames of reference, these modifiers should be able to get comparable annoyance scores in field studies.

A Class of Complex Modifiers in English

The linguist is concerned with meaningful generalizations about language.* In writing a generative grammar, an ordered set of rules that predicts the sentences of a given language, he looks for generalizations that can be translated into economical rules. Optimally a generative grammarl uses a relatively small number of general rules to predict many different structures. This paper will focus on a particular group of sentences-those containing2 adjectives-and construct rules to generate them. The first section will be devoted to the formulation of rules that bring adjectives into containing sentences, and the second will discuss adjectival comparisons (some of which are covered by the earlier rules) in detail. There are two steps in accounting for a grammatical fact or group of facts in the framework of generative grammar. First, a rule is formulated that will most simply produce the sentence(s) in question. Second, that rule must be related to the rest of the grammar, which means that a place in the ordered sequence of rules must be assigned to it. This step is as important as the first one: to be really economical, a grammar must exploit structural similarities between sentences whenever possible. At one stage in its development a particular sentence may have a structural similarity with another that it will lose later, so that a new rule must be carefully dovetailed with the others to apply to a maximum number of cases. These considerations will underlie the following discussion.