Prenominal Position Research Articles

Do children treat adjectives and nouns differently as modifiers in prenominal position?

Usage-based theories of children's syntactic acquisition (e.g., Tomasello, 2000a) predict that children's abstract lexical categories emerge from their experience with particular words in constructions in their input. Because modifiers in English are almost always prenominal, children might initially treat adjectives similarly to nouns when used in a prenominal position. In this study, we taught English-speaking preschoolers (between 2 and 6 years) novel nouns (object labels) and adjectives (words referring to attributes) in both prenominal and postnominal positions. The children corrected both postnominal adjectives and nouns to prenominal position, but corrected modifying nouns more often than adjectives. These results suggest that children differentiate between nouns and adjectives even when they occur in the same position and serve the same function (i.e., modification). Children were increasingly likely to correct postnominal adjectives (not nouns) with increasing age. We argue that children attend to word order more when it makes a difference in meaning.

Prenominal Adverbs, or Apparent Selectional Violations in Coordination

Abstract A robust generalization about coordinate structures is that X and Y may be conjoined in position P if and only if each of X and Y alone may occur in P. In particular, different grammatical categories (e.g., the NP a Republican and the AdjP proud of it) may be coordinated in a position that allows for either (e.g., Pat is [a Republican and proud of it]; Sag et al. 1985). Apparent violations of this generalization are sometimes taken as evidence for an asymmetric structure of coordination, where a single conjunct determines categorial features of the coordinate structure. Bruening and Al Khalaf 2020 and Bruening 2023 posit that one such violation involves coordination of AdvPs and AdjPs in prenominal positions that apparently do not allow for AdvPs alone; e.g., The [Once and Future] King (a book title) is grammatical, while the once king alone is claimed either to be ungrammatical or to involve a hypothetical compound once king that only a minority of English speakers accept. On the basis of rich attested data and acceptability judgment experiments, we demonstrate that adverbs such as once, now, soon, and twice combine with nouns in regular syntax, rather than via hypothetical compound forming processes. Hence, constructions exemplified by The Once and Future King do not violate the discussed generalization and do not provide an argument against the symmetric nature of coordination.

A study of the semantic preference and semantic prosody associated with the denominations of aging people

This paper studies the representation and conceptualization of aging people depending on the way they are referred to through a series of near synonyms: old / older / elderly / middle-aged / mature + N. A specific focus will be laid on the notions of "semantic preference," i.e., "the tendency for an item to co-occur with a set of semantically related words," and "semantic prosody," a.k.a. "evaluative, pragmatic, emotive or attitudinal prosody," to account for the evaluative aspect linked to certain denominations. This paper compares semantic preference and semantic prosody with five near-synonymous adjectives. It shows that denominations of aging people acquire a specific evaluation – a negative or positive semantic prosody – through their semantic preference, in that specific case the different attributive adjectives used in prenominal position of the sequences under scrutiny. This study addresses the question of the frequent negative axiology linked to the discourses on old age and aging through the notion of semantic prosody and will mostly examine the potential gender differences in the denominations of aging people.

Contactul româno-slav: efecte convergente în sintaxa românei vechi și a istroromânei

In this paper I present two cases of Romance-Slavic contact: direct contact in bilingual context (Istro-Romanian and Croatian), and indirect contact via translations (old Romanian and Old Church Slavonic). After briefly presenting the syntactic features attested in Istro-Romanian and in old Romanian (but which have disappeared from modern Romanian), I focus on two features: the prenominal position of relational adjectives and auxiliary inversion, features explained by convergence (as they are attested both in Latin/Old Romance and in the Slavonic contact languages, Croatian and Old Church Slavonic). Finally, I make some theoretical remarks on the consequences of contact in syntax.

Over-specification of small, borderline cardinalities and color in referential communication: the role of visual context, modifier position, and consistency.

This paper reports on two flash-mode experiments that test redundant descriptions of small (2-4) cardinalities, borderline (5-8) cardinalities, and color in referential communication. It provides further support for the idea that small cardinalities are more salient (due to subitizing), less sensitive to visual context, and therefore give rise to higher over-specification rates than color. Because of greater salience, Russian speakers more often use prenominal positions for numerals than for color adjectives. The paper also investigates borderline cardinalities and argues for the order factor that affects their salience, since ordered items can be perceived in small subitized parts. The ordered mode of presentation of the borderline cardinalities leads to higher over-specification rates and to higher percentages of prenominal positions than the unordered one. The paper provides further evidence for the consistency of small, borderline cardinalities, and color in people's choices to minimally specify or over-specify given objects in referential communication.

On the Emergence of Portuguese FCI qualquer: A Diachronic Perspective

Romance free choice items (FCIs) are frequently pointed out as resulting from the grammaticalization of the relative determiner qual ‘which’ and an element derived from a volition verb, such as querer ‘want’. Contrary to other Romance FCIs, Portuguese qualquer ‘any’ remains understudied, therefore motivating the current research. In this article, I investigate the syntax and semantics of qualquer, from a diachronic perspective, based on examples extracted from 13th and 14th century texts. Analysis of contexts of occurrence of qualquer showed that, in Old Portuguese, the elements qual and quer could combine in different configurations, corresponding to different structures. On the one hand, the relative determiner qual could combine with a form of the volition verb in ever free relative clauses. On the other hand, qual and quer were also combined in appositive relative clauses, which seem to be at the core of postnominal qualquer. However, similar to what is argued for Old Spanish, qualquer was also a quantifier-like element, occurring in prenominal position and giving rise to universal interpretations. The different origins of prenominal and postnominal qualquer may help explain the different readings in contemporary data.

Selectional Violations in Coordination (A Response to Patejuk and Przepiórkowski 2023)

Bruening and Al Khalaf (2020) show that selectional violations in coordination are extremely limited (there are exactly two) and exactly match those that are permitted in ellipsis and displacement. Patejuk and Przepiórkowski (2023) criticize Bruening and Al Khalaf’s article on numerous fronts. They do successfully show that conjuncts do not need to match in syntactic category, but their dismissal of the selectional violation data does not succeed. I present additional data, including the results of three large-scale acceptability surveys, that show that the two violations of selectional restrictions are real and are fully general. The two patterns that need an analysis are coordinations of NP&CP appearing where CPs are banned, and Adv&AP appearing in prenominal position where adverbs are banned. I propose a variation on Bruening and Al Khalaf’s analysis that accounts for all of the facts and meets Patejuk and Przepiórkowski’s objections.

Syntax matters in shaping sensorimotor activation driven by nouns.

Existing evidence has shown that adjectives modulate the grasp-compatibility effect elicited by object nouns. The aim of the present study was to investigate the role of syntax on the sensorimotor activation elicited by nouns in a grasp-compatibility task. We assessed two languages with different syntactic rules, Italian in Experiment 1 and English in Experiment 2. In both experiments, an adjective-noun pair was shown on the screen. The adjective was always in a pre-nominal position and denoted either a disadvantageous quality of the object graspability (e.g., sharp) or the object colour (e.g., reddish). Participants had to categorize the object nouns as natural or artifact, performing a precision or a power reach-to-grasp movement. On different trials, the grasp response was compatible or incompatible with the grip typically used to manipulate the object indicated by the noun. In Experiment 1 (Italian language) the adjective-noun order violated the syntactic order and no difference emerged between reaction times on compatible and incompatible trials (no grasp compatibility effect). In Experiment 2(English language), the adjective-noun order followed the syntactic rule. Results showed a grasp-compatibility effect when a colour adjective was presented before a natural object noun. When a disadvantageous adjective preceded an artifact or a natural object noun, an inverted grasp-compatibility effect emerged with slower responses on compatible than incompatible trials. Taken together, these findings suggest that adjectives can shape the sensorimotor activation elicited by nouns of graspable objects only when the syntax is correct. Results are discussed with respect to embodied cognition theories.

Comparing Single-Word Insertions and Multi-Word Alternations in Bilingual Speech: Insights from Pupillometry

Prominent sociolinguistic theories of language mixing have posited that single-word insertions of one language into the other are the result of a distinct process than multi-word alternations between two languages given that the former overwhelmingly surface morphosyntactically integrated into the surrounding language. To date, this distinction has not been tested in comprehension. The present study makes use of pupillometry to examine the online processing of single-word insertions and multi-word alternations by highly proficient Spanish-English bilinguals in Puerto Rico. Participants heard sentences containing target noun/adjective pairs (1) in unilingual Spanish, (2) where the Spanish noun was replaced with its English translation equivalent, followed by a Spanish post-nominal adjective, and (3) where both the noun and adjective appeared in English with the adjective occurring in the English pre-nominal position. Both types of language mixing elicit larger pupillary responses when compared to unilingual Spanish speech, though the magnitude of this difference depends on the grammatical gender of the target noun. Importantly, single-word insertions and multi-word alternations did not differ from one another. Taken together, these findings suggest that morphosyntactic integration is not the defining feature of single-word insertions, at least in comprehension, and that the comprehension system is tuned to the distributional properties of bilingual speech.

Adjective position and referential efficiency in American Sign Language: Effects of adjective semantics, sign type and age of sign exposure

Previous research has pointed at communicative efficiency as a possible constraint on language structure. Here we investigated adjective position in American Sign Language (ASL), a language with relatively flexible word order, to test the incremental efficiency hypothesis, according to which both speakers and signers try to produce efficient referential expressions that are sensitive to the word order of their languages. The results of three experiments using a standard referential communication task confirmed that deaf ASL signers tend to produce absolute adjectives, such as color or material, in prenominal position, while scalar adjectives tend to be produced in prenominal position when expressed as lexical signs, but in postnominal position when expressed as classifiers. Age of ASL exposure also had an effect on referential choice, with early-exposed signers producing more classifiers than late-exposed signers, in some cases. Overall, our results suggest that linguistic, pragmatic and developmental factors affect referential choice in ASL, supporting the hypothesis that communicative efficiency is an important factor in shaping language structure and use.

Closest conjunct agreement with attributive adjectives

AbstractContrary to most French grammars claiming that French only allows masculine agreement when mixed-gender nouns are conjoined, we show that closest conjunct agreement (CCA) does exist in contemporary French, as in other Romance languages, and is the preferred strategy for prenominal adjectives. Using data from a large corpus (FrWac) and an acceptability rating experiment, we show that (feminine) CCA is well accepted in contemporary French, and should be distinguished from attraction errors, despite the norm prescribing masculine agreement. We also show the role of the adjective position, i.e. prenominal or post-nominal, and humanness. CCA is the preferred strategy for prenominal adjectives, and non-human nouns favour CCA for post-nominal adjectives. Assuming a hierarchical structure for coordination, the closest noun is the highest in A-N order, whereas it is the lowest in N-A order. Thus CCA in prenominal position may be favoured by a shorter structural distance. One can also see CCA with a prenominal adjective as ‘early’ agreement. Regarding humanness, grammatical gender is interpreted as social gender with human nouns, and a masculine plural can refer to a mixed group. This ‘gender neutral’ plural may favour masculine agreement for human nouns, or the prescriptive norm is more influential for human nouns.

Situation partition and shifted evaluation of distributivity

In this paper, I discuss what I call group distributive readings. Japanese has a distributor “zutsu,” which can occur at the prenominal position or at the floating position. When it occurs at the prenominal position, distributivity is evaluated in a situation other than the situation in which the rest of the clause is evaluated. To account for this shifted evaluation ofdistributivity, I propose that “zutsu” partitions a situation and the shifted evaluation of distributivity comes from the presence of a situation pronoun. The syntactic distribution of group distributive readings follows from an independently motivated generalisation on situation pronoun binding. In addition, this situation-based account makes better predictions for the semantics of canonical distributive readings than previous analyses do.

Le superlatif des adjectifs tough suivis d'un supin en roumain contemporain. Problèmes d'Accord et de position adnominale

In contemporary Romanian, adjectives of the tough class combined with a verbal supine are said to be invariable . This article uses corpus data to show that while this is on the whole true for adjectives in the plain form, it is not true for superlatives, which agree with the noun they refer to in more than 40 per cent of the cases . It is also shown that superlative tough adjectives occur much more often in prenominal position than do tough adjectives in the plain form . They are, however, more prone to appear after the head noun than superlatives in general . Superlatives of the type in question can also split around the noun they modify, as can other types of superlative constructions with a complement . The possibility for a tough adjective in the plain form to appear before the noun when followed by a supine complement is, however, a unique feature for this type of AP.

Pre- and postnominal onymic genitives in (Early) New High German

AbstractThis empirical study focuses on the diachrony of adnominal genitives of proper names in (Early) New High German (17th to 19th centuries), e.g.,Carls Hausvs.das Haus Carls‘Carl’s house’. Starting from the observation that word order variation exists within the whole period investigated, the study identifies determining factors for this variation and weights them in a multifactorial model of word order variation and change, the first time this has been done for German. The focus is on formal factors such as syntactic complexity, a factor that increases in importance over the observed time span. The historical data allow not only the investigation of established formal parameters but also the identification of new factors such as the type of inflectional marker (due to genitive allomorphy in older stages of German). In addition to these formal factors, genitive semantics, pragmatic information status and genre are also taken into account. Explanations for the trend towards the postnominal position of complex adnominal genitives as well as the stability of bare name possessors in the prenominal position are discussed.

On the Syntactic Category of kkway ‘quite’ in Korean

This paper argues that the degree modifier kkway ‘quite’ in Korean is used as an adjective inside NPs although it is normally used as a degree adverb inside the predicate of a sentence. Several pieces of evidence for the adjectival status of kkway ‘quite’ are provided in this paper: i) kkway ‘quite’ inside NPs cannot have the topic marker -(n)un like other adjectives, ii) kkway ‘quite’ must appear in the prenominal position when it modifies a head noun, iii) kkway ‘quite’ restricts the meaning of the head noun, iv) kkway ‘quite’ can be modified by a degree adverb, and v) kkway ‘quite’ can be stacked with other typical adjectives within NPs. I further show with similar evidence that other degree modifiers – sangdanghi ‘considerable’ and maywu ‘very’ – can be also used as an adjective inside NPs. Finally, some nominal expressions with kkway ‘quite’ are analyzed in the Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Pollard & Sag, 1994; Sag, Wasow, & Bender, 2003).

Possessives, from Franco-Provençal and Occitan Systems to Contact Dialects in Apulia and Calabria

This article investigates the contact-induced reorganization of the possessive system in the Gallo-Romance dialects spoken from around the 12th century in the villages of Celle and Faeto in North Apulia and Guardia Piemontese in North-West Calabria. Gallo-Romance possessives exclude the article in the prenominal position, whereas in the Southern Italian dialects, possessives follow the noun preceded by the definite article. This original contrast is no longer visible in the varieties of Celle, Faeto and Guardia which changed the original prenominal position to the postnominal position combining with the article, except with kinship terms, preserving the original prenominal position. At the heart of contact phenomena, there are bilingualism and transfer mechanisms between the languages included in the complex knowledge of the speaker, suggesting a test bed for the treatment of language variation and parameterization. We propose an account of morpho-syntactic and interpretive properties of possessives, making use of the insights from the comparison of contact systems with prenominal (Franco-Provençal and Occitan varieties) and postnominal (Southern Italian dialects) possessives. The final part examines the distribution of possessives, tracing it back to the definiteness properties of DP and proposes a phasal treatment based on syntactic and interpretive constraints.

Old Grammars New (?) Scope: Adjective Placement in Native and Non-Native Spanish

Prior studies have examined the association between modifying adjective placement and interpretation in second language (L2) Spanish. These studies show evidence of convergence with native speaker’s intuitions, which is interpreted as restructuring of the underlying grammar. Two issues deserve further study: (i) there are debates on the nature of native speaker’s interpretations; (ii) previous results could be explained by a combination of explicit instruction and access to the first language (L1). The present study re-examines native and non-native intuitions on the interpretation of variable order adjectives in pre-nominal and post-nominal positions, and extends the domain of inquiry by asking if L2 learners have intuitions about the order of two-adjective sequences, which appear in mirror image order in English and Spanish (faded blue pants vs. pantalones azules desteñidos). Two-adjective sequences are rare in the input, not typically taught explicitly, and have a different word order that cannot be [partially] derived from the L1 subgrammar. Two groups of non-native speakers (n = 50) and native speaker controls (n = 15) participated in the study. Participants completed a preference task, testing the interaction between word order and restrictive/non-restrictive interpretation, and an acceptability judgement task, testing ordering intuitions for two-adjective sequences. Results of the preference task show that the majority of speakers, both native and non-native, prefer variable adjectives in a post-nominal position independent of interpretation. Results of the acceptability judgement task indicate that both native and non-native speakers prefer mirror image order. We conclude that these results support underlying grammar reanalysis in L2 speakers and indicate that the semantic distribution of variable adjectives is not fully complementary; rather, the post-nominal position is unmarked, and generally preferred by both native and non-native speakers.

Some notes on outro in Portuguese

This paper studies the syntactic behavior of outro(s) in Brazilian and European Portuguese. Starting from the syntax of its Italian counterpart un altro/(degli) altri, we argue that outro(s)in prenominal position is neither an adjective nor a determiner, but an existential quantifier and that the presence of the indefinite article, um outro/uns outros, gives rise to a complex existential quantifier, like the corresponding Italian form. We also argue that outro(s) and um outro/uns outros do not specialize for different interpretations since they both substantially show the same ambiguity (one/some more or a/some different one(s)) and behave in the same way in relation to possible semantic interpretations typical of existential quantifiers

Adjectival modification in Truku Seediq

AbstractThis paper investigates the position of adjectives in noun phrases in Truku Seediq, proposing that the two documented positions correspond to different semantics as well as a difference in syntax. While post-nominal adjectives, corresponding to basic word-order in Truku Seediq, may be either restrictive or descriptive, pre-nominal adjectives, seen as an innovation, are semantically restrictive. This paper also argues for a difference in syntactic structure for both kinds of adjectives, restrictive adjectives heading their own projection while descriptive adjectives are bare adjectives standing in a closer relationship to the modified noun. This paper further identifies a syntactic constraint for pre-nominal adjectival placement that applies regardless of restrictivity of the modifier, namely the presence of a possessive clitic to the right of the modified noun. Data collection is achieved through both a traditional elicitation method and an experimental task-based method. Data are further digitalized in order to ensure systematic searchability. The data thus collected are apt to support semantic analysis as well as an investigation of age-group-related variation. It is claimed that language contact with Mandarin Chinese may be one of the triggering factors for the development of a pre-nominal position for modifying adjectives in Truku Seediq.

Adjective-Noun combinations in Romance and Greek of Southern Italy

AbstractThis paper investigates aspects of adjectival modification in Romance and Greek of Southern Italy. In Italiot Greek, prenominal adjectives obey restrictions that do not exist in Standard Modern Greek, where all types of adjectives are allowed in prenominal position. As far as postnominal adjectives are concerned, in the textual tradition of Calabria Greek there is evidence of postnominal adjectives systematically articulated in definite nominal structures (henceforth DP s), in a structure similar to the so-called polydefinite construction that is typical of Standard Modern Greek (and of Greek in general since ancient times). Some residual evidence of such a construction is also found in Salento. Yet, in the varieties currently spoken in the two areas, postnominal adjectives are never articulated. The paper explores these patterns, with particular attention to the mechanisms potentially responsible for the loss of polydefiniteness.