Noun Modifiers Research Articles

Re-discovering the Quechua adjective

This article describes the adjective class in Quechua, countering many previous accounts of the language as a linguistic type with no adjective/noun distinction. It applies a set of common crosslinguistic criteria for distinguishing adjectives to data from several dialects of Ecuadorian Highland Quechua (EHQ), analyzing examples from a natural speech audio/video corpus, speaker intuitions of grammaticality, and controlled elicitation exercises. It is concluded that by virtually any standard Quechua shows clear evidence for a distinct class of attributive noun modifiers, and that in the future Quechua should not be considered a “flexible” noun/adjective language for the purposes of crosslinguistic comparison.

The "Fame Effect" or How the syntactic choices of writers can be explained by their assumptions about their addressees' state of knowledge: the case of relevance-oriented, non-restrictive noun modifiers1

In this paper we would like to explore, within Vallduvi’s (1992, 1993) information packaging theory, how writers’ assumptions about their addressees’ state of knowledge can account for the choice writers make between competing syntactic structures, which we call “allostructures”, to convey the same informational content. The assumed old/new informational status has then an influence on the grammatical choices made by the writers. In particular we investigate here, using the web as corpus, the constraints that govern writers’ choice between the following non-restrictive modifiers of nouns that aim at optimizing the relevance (as defined by Sperber & Wilson) of the referents denoted by the nouns they modify: nominal appositives, appositive relative clauses, non-restrictive pre-modifiers.

The disambiguation of “Modifier Noun no Noun”constructions in Japanese

The disambiguation of “Modifier Noun no Noun”constructions in Japanese

Generation of novel semantic representations in aging and Alzheimer’s disease

The process of combining two words to create or identify a new concept is highly productive in English. A noun–noun compound may be interpreted by integrating a feature of the modifying noun into the head noun’s representation (property interpretation), or by aligning the referents in a context (relational interpretation). In the present study, young ( n = 13) and older ( n = 15) adults, and patients with probable Alzheimer’s disease (AD, n = 11) generated definitions for novel compounds. Older adults produced fewer property, but not relational, interpretations than younger adults, suggesting that the two routes to interpretation are dissociable. Young adults produced more expected and fewer unexpected property interpretations than older adults; higher production of unexpected property interpretations by AD participants relative to older adults was also observed. This finding may be due to impairments in inhibitory functioning in healthy aging and AD, which result in reduced inhibition of irrelevant or less salient features of the modifying noun. All participants produced both types of interpretation, suggesting that both comprehension routes are available in healthy aging and AD.

The Ibibio Locative Copular Constructions

The Ibibio language, a member of the Lower Cross group of languages is predominantly spoken in Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria. Ibibio has two types of copular construction. One is locative while the other is predicative. Using a purely descriptive approach/method, this paper provides a descriptive account of the copular locative constructions in Ibibio. This study is based on a database collected from adult speakers of Ibibio by the author using an elicitation list. The database includes both actual and potential words/sentences, which standard Ibibio speakers found to be in consistent with their language rules. The paper has observed that Ibibio copular locatives make use of locative copular verbs which have semantic content, but are however, with indeterminate locative precision except when they co- occur with an appropriate locative complement. It has further observed that in Ibibio, the location of a subject entity can be marked with locative elements in two ways. In the first instance, a locative copular verb which can be doro, ‘be on’ sinee ‘be in’ ba ‘be at’ obligatorily co-occurs with a deitic locative complement or a locative prepositional phrase (PP) complement headed by a multipurpose preposition (P), ke. The P is semantically, interpreted as either on, in, at or under depending on the particular locative copular verb that it co-occurs with. In the second instance, in addition to the locative copular verb and the locative PP complement headed by the P ke, there is also within the PP complement (headed by the P ke), a locative relational noun modifier which, modifies the head noun, a complement to the locative P ke. Based on Ameka and Levinson’s (2007) cross-linguistic classification of positional and locative verbs, the paper concludes that Ibibio belongs to the multi-verb type of languages with inherently locative copular verbs which are used to express the spatial locative orientation of subject entities.

The Effect of Prosody on Conceptual Combination

Research into people's comprehension of novel noun-noun phrases has long neglected the possible influences of prosody during meaning construction. At the same time, work in conceptual combination has disagreed about whether different classes of interpretation emerge from single or multiple processes; for example, whether people use distinct mechanisms when they interpret octopus apartment as property-based (e.g., an apartment with eight rooms) or relation-based (e.g., an apartment where an octopus lives). In two studies, we manipulate the prosodic emphasis patterns of novel noun-noun combinations (placing stress on the modifier noun, the head noun, or dual stress on both nouns) and ask participants to generate an interpretation for the novel phrase. Results show that people are faster to generate property-based interpretations when dual emphasis stresses both nouns equally, with prosody having little effect on the speed of relation-based interpretations. These findings highlight a role for prosody during meaning construction and underline important differences between relation- and property-based interpretations that are difficult to reconcile with unitary process views of conceptual combination.

Oraciones de Relativo Circunnominales en Miles Gloriosus de Plauto

Las oraciones de relativo circunnominales son un modelo especial de subordinadas que se incrustan en el sintagma nominal y actúan como modificadores del sustantivo. Su particularidad es que el elemento al que se refieren –denominado en algunas tradiciones gramaticales como “antecedente”- sigue al pronombre relativo que encabeza la construcción. Esta investigación procura examinar las oraciones de relativo circunnominales en Miles Gloriosus de Plauto desde el punto de vista tipológico-funcional. La metodología base de este trabajo es el análisis de este sintagma postulado como una unidad que aparece motivado por su función comunicativa.

Semantic bias in the acquisition of relative clauses in Japanese

This study analyzes the acquisition of relative clauses in Japanese to determine the semantic and functional characteristics of children's relative clauses in spontaneous speech. Longitudinal data from five Japanese children are analyzed and compared with English data (Diessel & Tomasello, 2000). The results show that the relative clauses produced by Japanese children predominantly have stative/attributive predicates. Additionally, early relative clauses in Japanese are often used to identify a referent that is not present in the context of interaction. These findings contrast with Diessel & Tomasello's (2000) English data, and possible explanations include the input that children are exposed to, which reflects typological characteristics of noun modification in Japanese.

Degree modification of gradable nouns: size adjectives and adnominal degree morphemes

Degree readings of size adjectives, as in big stamp-collector, cannot be explained away as merely the consequence of some extragrammatical phenomenon. Rather, this paper proposes that they actually reflect the grammatical architecture of nominal gradability. Such readings are available only for size adjectives in attributive positions, and systematically only for adjectives that predicate bigness. These restrictions can be understood as part of a broader picture of gradable NPs in which adnominal degree morphemes—often overt—play a key role, analogous to their role in the extended AP. Size adjectives acquire degree readings through a degree morpheme similar to the one that licenses AP-modifying measure phrases. Its syntax gives rise to positional restrictions on the availability of these readings, and the semantics of degree measurement interacts with the scale structure of size adjectives to give rise to restrictions on the adjective itself.

Étude développementale de l’interprétation de combinaisons conceptuelles nominales « relation » et « propriété »

The present research addresses how people interpret novel noun–noun conceptual combinations. First, we focused on two types of conceptual combinations: property and relational combinations. Secondly, we manipulated the order of the constituents. Finally, we studied if the interpretation in terms of “Property” or “Relation” changes along with age. So, four groups of 6-, 8- and 10-year-old children and adults participated in a production task. Our results indicated that the interpretations in terms of relation were more frequent for the “Relation” combinations compared to the “Property” ones. Property-transferring interpretations increased with age when Property combinations are presented. The most frequent interpretations followed the order Head noun–Modifier, which is opposite to the order observed in English.

An integrated database-pipeline system for studying single nucleotide polymorphisms and diseases.

BackgroundStudies on the relationship between disease and genetic variations such as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are important. Genetic variations can cause disease by influencing important biological regulation processes. Despite the needs for analyzing SNP and disease correlation, most existing databases provide information only on functional variants at specific locations on the genome, or deal with only a few genes associated with disease. There is no combined resource to widely support gene-, SNP-, and disease-related information, and to capture relationships among such data. Therefore, we developed an integrated database-pipeline system for studying SNPs and diseases.ResultsTo implement the pipeline system for the integrated database, we first unified complicated and redundant disease terms and gene names using the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) for classification and noun modification, and the HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee (HGNC) and NCBI gene databases. Next, we collected and integrated representative databases for three categories of information. For genes and proteins, we examined the NCBI mRNA, UniProt, UCSC Table Track and MitoDat databases. For genetic variants we used the dbSNP, JSNP, ALFRED, and HGVbase databases. For disease, we employed OMIM, GAD, and HGMD databases. The database-pipeline system provides a disease thesaurus, including genes and SNPs associated with disease. The search results for these categories are available on the web page , and a genome browser is also available to highlight findings, as well as to permit the convenient review of potentially deleterious SNPs among genes strongly associated with specific diseases and clinical phenotypes.ConclusionOur system is designed to capture the relationships between SNPs associated with disease and disease-causing genes. The integrated database-pipeline provides a list of candidate genes and SNP markers for evaluation in both epidemiological and molecular biological approaches to diseases-gene association studies. Furthermore, researchers then can decide semi-automatically the data set for association studies while considering the relationships between genetic variation and diseases. The database can also be economical for disease-association studies, as well as to facilitate an understanding of the processes which cause disease. Currently, the database contains 14,674 SNP records and 109,715 gene records associated with human diseases and it is updated at regular intervals.

Only the Strong: Restricting Situation Variables

No abstract.

Large-scale directional relationship extraction and resolution

BackgroundRelationships between entities such as genes, chemicals, metabolites, phenotypes and diseases in MEDLINE are often directional. That is, one may affect the other in a positive or negative manner. Detection of causality and direction is key in piecing pathways together and in examining possible implications of experimental results. Because of the size and growth of biomedical literature, it is increasingly important to be able to automate this process as much as possible.ResultsHere we present a method of relation extraction using dependency graph parsing with SVM classification. We tested the SVM classifier first on gold standard corpora from GENIA and find it achieved 82% precision and 94.8% recall (F-measure of 87.9) on these standardized test sets. We then applied the entire system to all available MEDLINE abstracts for two target interactions with known effects. We find that while some directional relations are extracted with low ambiguity, others are apparently contradictory, at least when considered in an isolated context. When examined, it is apparent some are dependent upon the surrounding context (e.g. whether the relationship referred to short-term or long-term effects, or whether the focus was extracellular versus intracellular).ConclusionThesaurus-based directional relation extraction can be done with reasonable accuracy, but is prone to false-positives on larger corpora due to noun modifiers. Furthermore, methods of resolving or disambiguating relationship context and contingencies are important for large-scale corpora.

An asymmetric effect of relational integration on recognition memory

Two experiments assessed whether conceptual relations (e.g., contains: COOKIE JAR) facilitate the retrieval of concepts (e.g., COOKIE and JAR) from long-term memory. The CARIN model of nominal combination asserts that conceptual relations are represented with and selected from the modifier noun (COOKIE). Thus, the model predicts that relational integration will facilitate memory for modifiers but not for head nouns (JAR). In Experiment 1, concepts were studied in pairs and were then tested individually. Recognition accuracy was higher for modifiers than for head nouns. In Experiment 2, the studied concepts (e.g., COOKIE JAR) were tested in the context of a new pair that instantiated either the same relation (e.g., COOKIE plate) or a different relation (e.g., COOKIE crumb). Recognition was again better for modifiers than for head nouns, but only when the same conceptual relation was instantiated at both study and test. Thus, results indicate that conceptual relations (a) facilitate recognition memory, and (b) are associated more strongly with the modifier than with the head noun.

Morphophonological influences on the comprehension of subject–verb agreement: An ERP study

Event-related potentials were used to study whether factors known to influence subject–verb number agreement in production exert analogous effects on sentence comprehension. Participants read Dutch sentences containing subject–verb number agreement errors while their brainwaves were measured. The determiner of the singular head noun could be ambiguous or unambiguous in number and the modifier (“local”) noun could be plural or singular. Both ambiguity and number match affect error rates in production. We expected evoked potentials in response to the verb to be modulated by number ambiguity; larger effects were expected when the sentences started with an unambiguous determiner. When the local noun was singular, we observed a more negative wave elicited by the incorrect verbs compared to the correct verbs in the 350–400 ms time-window. This effect was largest when the head noun phrase contained no number ambiguity. When the local noun was plural the waves were more positive for incorrect verbs than for correct verbs in the 600–650 ms time-window. Again this effect was largest when the head noun phrase contained no number ambiguity. Most importantly, the results show that agreement computation in comprehension is influenced by the same factors as in production. We further suggest that in the sentences with a singular local noun there is a shallow analysis of the sentence, but the sentences with a plural local noun require a deeper syntactic analysis.

Noun Classifier Constructions in Thai: a Case Study in Construction Grammar

This paper is a study in the framework of Construction Grammar that seeks for how much information grammatical units like noun classifier constructions in Thai can reveal and why such information must be presented as distinctive grammatical properties. The findings show that noun classifiers, occurring in nominal phrases, have a large number of grammatical functions not restricted to syntax but encompassing semantics and pragmatics, as well. They function syntactically by constituting numeric phrases, standing for head nouns, substituting for nouns, acting as the heads of modifier constructions, acting as noun modifiers and disambiguating constructions. Semantically, they are divided into generic and perceptual main types, which evince different syntactic behaviors. Finally, they pragmatically function by unitizing nouns, referring to particular entities, individuating items, and indicating the numeral ‘one’. It is these pragmatic functions that motivate their forms/structures. Therefore, information types such as semantic and/or pragmatic properties need to be included in the explanation and viewed as a cluster of information, rather than autonomous syntax.

The role of experience in the interpretation of noun–noun combinations

Gagné and Shoben’s (J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn 23:71–87, 1997) Competition Among Relations In Nominals (CARIN) theory maintains that the interpretation of modifier-noun combinations is influenced primarily by how the modifying noun has been used in the past. As support for this theory, they found that modifiers typically associated with the instantiated relation are interpreted reliably faster than those whose modifiers are less frequently associated with the relation. The CARIN theory explains this phenomenon by proposing that people store statistical distributions regarding the frequency with which modifying nouns have combined with each relation in the past. However, we maintain that an association between relation frequency and response time does not imply a causal influence. In this study we explore whether the effects observed by Gagné and Shoben were caused by the influence of relation frequency per se. Two experiments were conducted in which experiential knowledge about the modifier was controlled. The first experiment involved combinations whose modifiers were relatively rare and the second involved the presentation of nouns without a modifier-head syntax. In both of these experiments, knowledge about historical modifier usage was irrelevant. Our results show that correlations between modifier preference and response time persist even in situations where a knowledge of the modifier’s history is not available. These findings provide converging evidence that the relationship between relation frequency and response time is not a causal one. Instead, an understanding of the relationship between modifier properties and usage, as appropriate to the given context, may be the dominant influence on interpretation in many circumstances. In light of this, we propose an alternative account of the factors influencing ease of interpretation.

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.

Some restrictions on Sesotho null noun class prefixes

Some Sesotho nouns may be used without a noun prefix (a phenomenon we refer to as null noun class prefix). There are several studies that deal with this phenomenon in relation to language acquisition (Kunene, 1979; Suzman, 1980; Connelly, 1984; Tsonope, 1987; Demuth, 1988 and Ziesler & Demuth, 1995). Machobane (2003) deals with this phenomenon in Sesotho, paying attention to the determiner phrase (DP) structure. She argues that in some Bantu languages the noun prefix is the head of DP, while in others a phonologically empty D is the head. This difference leads to parametric variations in DP structures. This article explores phonological, morphological, semantic, syntactic and discourse factors that contribute to the null prefix phenomenon. It shows that phonologically null prefixes are associated with the consonants [1], [s] and [d], which are [+coronal]. The prefixes with the consonants [m] and [b], which have the feature [-coronal], do not allow null prefixes (except in the case of class 14). Morphologically, the nouns that have an agreement which is identical to the noun prefix, allow a null prefix, while the ones that have an agreement prefix which is not identical with the noun prefix, do not (except for class 2). Syntactically, a null prefix is possible where there is agreement in the form of the subject verb agreement, noun modifier or copulative complement. At a discourse level, a null prefix appears when a noun expresses given/old information or is salient in the discourse context. However, none of the suggested explanations can account for a null prefix on its own.

Mapping meaning onto form

This paper is a corpus-based contrastive study of one particular semantic area — the modification of nouns — and the grammatical structures available in English and Spanish to actualize this particular meaning within the scope of the NP. Two large monolingual reference corpora, one in each language, have been used to extract the empirical data on which to base the analysis. A functional approach has been followed, starting from perceived similarities in meaning and trying to reveal the subtle links between particular semantic functions and the structures most commonly employed by native speakers of the two languages to convey those semantic functions. The working procedure will be described in detail, from the data selection process, to the description, juxtaposition and final contrast. This paper presents part of the contrastive results found in a larger study (Ramón 2003), and shows the appropriateness of the methodology employed in order to obtain contrastive data useful in applied areas such as foreign language teaching, and, especially, in the field of translation.