Set Of Adjectives Research Articles

An analysis of viewpoints by the use of frequent multi-word sequences in DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover

This paper examines how particular multi-word sequences and a set of adjectives that are closely related to the leading protagonists’ viewpoints contribute to the character development and narrative construction in the fictional text, DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (LCL). LCL is an iconic novel that explores sensuality and sexuality as being an essential part of humanity. To collect linguistic material for examination, I used a frequency list of the text of LCL as the primary source. From the frequency list, the most frequent mental verbs, perception verbs, body part nouns and adjectives were chosen for retrieving the most frequent 2/3-grams. These expressions, which occur frequently in the text, are primarily used for establishing the viewpoint of the leading character, Connie. These verbs, nouns and adjectives are also used to present the other main characters’ internal states, perceptions and viewpoints, although less frequently. These characters’ inner worlds, compared with Connie’s, whose intentions, motives and desires are transparent to the reader, appear to be less discernible and more distant from the reader. However, after Connie became intimately involved with the gamekeeper, Mellors’s viewpoint is more often introduced by similar lexical items to those that were applied to presenting Connie’s internal states. The analysis has revealed how particular linguistic means are related to different characters’ viewpoints.

The learning of adjectives and nouns from affordance and appearance features

We study how a robot can link concepts represented by adjectives and nouns in language with its own sensorimotor interactions. Specifically, an iCub humanoid robot interacts with a group of objects using a repertoire of manipulation behaviors. The objects are labeled using a set of adjectives and nouns. The effects induced on the objects are labeled as affordances, and classifiers are learned to predict the affordances from the appearance of an object. We evaluate three different models for learning adjectives and nouns using features obtained from the appearance and affordances of an object, through cross-validated training as well as through testing on novel objects. The results indicate that shape-related adjectives are best learned using features related to affordances, whereas nouns are best learned using appearance features. Analysis of the feature relevancy shows that affordance features are more relevant for adjectives, and appearance features are more relevant for nouns. We show that adjective predictions can be used to solve the odd-one-out task on a number of examples. Finally, we link our results with studies from psychology, neuroscience and linguistics that point to the differences between the development and representation of adjectives and nouns in humans.

Blackness in Opera ed. by Naomi Andre, Karen M. Bryan, and Eric Saylor (review)

Reviewed by: Blackness in Opera ed. by Naomi Andre, Karen M. Bryan, and Eric Saylor Tom Riis Blackness in Opera. Naomi Andre, Karen M. Bryan, and Eric Saylor, eds. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2012. 304 pp. $35.00. Arguably the greatest African American concert composer in the twentieth century, William Grant Still (1895-1978), as Gayle Murchison tells us here, [End Page 185] once declared, “My love has always been opera—the theater. This love of operatic music, stimulated in my early youth by listening to operatic records, was the thing that first aroused the desire to compose. All my other work has been a means to this end” (141). Such a statement demands close attention. What has opera meant for black folks in general? What has it done to them and for them, and what has black opera meant for everyone else? Blackness in Opera sets out to address these questions. Ann Sears, in her chapter on Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha, lends a keynote for the whole volume by citing a passage from Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk (1903): “Here [to America] we brought our three [African] gifts and mingled them with yours: a gift of story and song …; the gift of sweat and brawn …; the third, a gift of the spirit.… Actively we have woven ourselves with the very warp and woof of this nation” (112). Most of the other authors here join with Sears to illustrate the wide variety of contributions among Du Bois’s woven weavers—black composers, writers, directors, singers, actors. This collection of essays has evident roots in an academic setting (all fourteen of the contributing authors hold professorships in colleges or universities, while only one, George Shirley, has achieved an international reputation as a performer), and forms a part of the larger, continuing—perhaps perpetual—discussion about race consciousness within the performing arts, both lowbrow and highbrow, within the United States. The olio of “black” works and “black” performers discussed here is examined through many lenses, with attention given to dominant class or subaltern images, social and stage constructions of race, various understandings of opera as an American genre similar to but different from its European parents (although a few non-American works are included), various musical metaphors, period conventions, physical signs, and verbal markers for ethnicity, and the economic power dynamics implicated in theatrical productions everywhere. In his introduction, Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr. asserts, “The present collection … attempts to identify and theorize the various ways in which the idea of blackness has worked as a practice—as a complex of representational strategies in the genre of opera.” Ramsey acknowledges that “these essays do not present a unified theoretical voice, but like the practice of blackness itself forward complex ideas about race, humanity, and creativity … [derived from a] notoriously unstable set of assumptions, ploys, signs and compositional strategies” (ix). The themes expounded upon here range widely—from the meaning of blackface in a seventeenth-century Jacobean court entertainment (Schmalenberger, “Hearing the Other in The Masque of Blackness”) to an allegoric Weimar Republic fantasy about a black American violinist in a “jazz opera” with hardly any actual jazz music (Wipplinger, “Performing Race in Ernst Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf”) to the stimulus to black artistic consciousness and creativity provided by the U. S. invasion of Haiti in 1915 (Bryan, “Clarence Cameron White’s Ouanga! in the World of the Harlem Renaissance”) to gender-conscious studies of female characters created by such male writers as George Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein II, and Scott Joplin. The poet Vijay Seshadri once described William Carlos Williams as “moralistic, pragmatic, and quixotic in his search for an American measure to match the American voice.” The chapters of this collection are also aptly described by this diverse set of adjectives. All twelve chapters tackle in various ways the inherently gnarly challenge of distilling meaning from a genre encrusted with assumptions about its contemporary status (and for which sophisticated analysis is of uneven quality). The critical place of individual operatic works over time—the first ones appeared in Italy around 1600—has come down to us more or less correlated to the posthumous reputation of the composers or librettists...

Selecting representative affective dimensions using Procrustes analysis: An application to mobile phone design

Collecting affective responses (ARs) from consumers is crucial to designers aspiring to produce an appealing product. Adjectives are frequently used by researchers as an affective means by which consumers can describe their subjective feelings regarding a specific product design. This study proposes a Kansei engineering (KE) approach for selecting representative affective dimensions using factor analysis (FA) and Procrustes analysis (PA). A semantic differential (SD) experiment is used to examine consumers’ ARs toward a set of representative product samples. FA is employed to extract the underlying latent factors using an initial set of affective dimensions. A backward elimination process based on PA is used to determine the relative significance of adjectives in each step according to the calculated residual sum of squared differences (RSSDs) to finally obtain the ranking of the initial set of adjectives. Additionally, the results of the proposed approach are compared to the method that combines FA and two-stage cluster analysis (CA). A case study of mobile phone design is provided to demonstrate the analysis results.

A Study on the Semantics of the English Polar Opposition

This paper discusses the semantics of a certain set of English adjectives that come in pairs and often follow an intensifier such as 'quite'. Pairs of adjectives such as 'old/young' and 'good/bad' are examples of these adjectives which indicate two extremes of a quality being described on some scales. This set of adjectives is referred to as polarity in the literature. Previous studies have observed the fact that the primary meaning of this type of pairs of adjectives is that one member of these pairs has negative connotations and the other member positive. Recently, the adjectives have been extensively discussed in terms of the semantics of measuring phrases that modify the adjectives. Particularly, the discussions have focused on the conditions which the adjectives must satisfy when they are modified by measuring phrases. In light of this, the major goal of this paper is to argue that the semantic characteristics of polar adjectives in English can be best explained based on the assumption that part of the meaning of the English adjectives is to establish relations between objects and abstract degrees on a scale following McNally & Kennedy (2008), and that the meaning of sentences containing the adjectives is to specify orderings between degrees on a particular scale.

Is Otomí creating a new lexical class for the modification of noun phrases as a result of the contact with Spanish?

Abstract In this contribution we seek support for the hypothesis that Otomí, a language from Mexico, which is in intense contact with Spanish, is developing a specialized set of adjectives, a category that is lacking from the classical language. Arguments are derived from two sources, a corpus of translations into Otomí of around 750 Spanish adjectives, and a corpus of 59 short texts in spoken Otomí, in which a number of Spanish adjectives were found as loanwords. Pointing out several changes in the contemporary language, mainly among younger, often bilingual speakers, we provide support for our hypothesis, which suggests that Otomí is undergoing a typological change.

Extraposition constructions in the deontic domain: state-of-affairs (SoA)-related versus speaker-related uses

This study examines how extraposition constructions with adjectives, such as it is important to honour those who have done honour to us (CB) function in the deontic and directive domain. It is found that in these two domains, which correlate with different sets of adjectives, the adjectival expressions can function on two distinct levels, either relating to the real world (State of Affairs [SoA]-related), or relating to the speaker's argumentative goals (speaker-related). These levels have also been noted for other linguistic categories, such as interclausal relations (e.g., Davies, On the semantics of syntax: Mood and condition in English, Croom Helm, 1979; Sweetser, From etymology to pragmatics, Cambridge University Press, 1990; Verstraete, Rethinking the coordinate–subordinate dichotomy: Interpersonal grammar and the analysis of adverbial clauses in English, Mouton de Gruyter, 2007). Within the set of speaker-related uses, a further distinction will be proposed between text-building uses and mental focus on a proposition uses. The first type serves to build arguments, or to specify or justify the organization of a text. The second type is used to make the hearer focus mentally on a propositional content. It will be argued that this latter type is a partially filled construction in the sense of Goldberg (Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure, University of Chicago Press, 1995). In this sense, this study proposes a constructionally motivated typology of extraposition constructions in the deontic-directive domain.

A Usage-based Approach to Spanish Verbs of 'Becoming'

A usage-based analysis of four constructions in Spanish, each with a different verb meaning 'become' used with an animate subject and an adjective, provides evidence for exemplar representations of constructions, with analogy to these representations accounting for productive use. We analyze 423 tokens from spoken and written corpora, which we take to represent a subset of a speaker's experience with these constructions. The analysis, based on token frequency and semantic similarity, leads to the organization of tokens with two of the verbs into dense clusters of semantically related adjectives centered on a high-frequency exemplar. The other two verbs are used with more diverse sets of adjectives. We supplement the initial analysis with an experiment in which speakers were asked to rate the semantic similarity of pairs of adjectives. When subjected to multidimensional scaling, the results of the experiment support the initial analysis. We argue that novel instances of verb + adjective sequences are based on analogies to previous experience and not on rules that refer to abstract features. In a second experiment, speakers judged the acceptability of sentences taken from the corpora; the results showed that high-frequency expressions and expressions semantically similar to the high-frequency ones lead to an expression being judged more acceptable. Overall the results support exemplar representations, which are heavily based on usage experience.

Fundamental dimensions of affective responses to product shapes

One of designers’ important tasks is to evoke specific affective responses via the manipulation of product shapes. In this research, we investigate the structure of the relationship between product shapes and affective responses. We selected three product categories—automobile, sofa, and kettle—representing large, medium, and small products, and conducted three parallel studies to uncover fundamental dimensions of affective responses to product shapes. From factor analysis results of the three product categories, we distilled four fundamental dimensions, the trend factor (T), the emotion factor (E), the complexity factor (C), and the potency factor (P). These fundamental dimensions underlying affective judgments of product shapes provide a common framework for studies on affective responses to product shapes. For each of the four dimensions, we also extract significant shape features and feature levels called the “significant shape features” (SSFs) that highly correlate to specific affective responses. Relevance to industry Psychological aspects of ergonomics have become increasingly important in the pursuit of products that are not only safe and efficient, but also pleasurable to use. To understand the perceptions and preferences of consumers, design companies or design departments often need to conduct studies on affective responses elicited by products. This work uncovers four fundamental dimensions in the affective reactions to product shapes, which could provide the basic set of adjectives for such affective studies. Because each product has its unique characteristics, the set of adjectives in such a survey should include both the fundamental dimensions and adjectives tailored to the particular product.

Lexical Access in Bulgarian: Nouns and Adjectives with and without Floating Vowels

The main goal of the experiments described in this paper was to compare the behavior of Bulgarian words with vs. without «vowel/O» alternation. The O-form may for instance be observed, within the relevant word paradigms, in noun plurals, in adjectives’ gender and plural inflections, and in derived nouns. The materials in experiment 1 consisted of six sets of frequency controlled Bulgarian words, contrasting with respect to the following factors: Alternation (sets A1, B1, C1 with alternation vs. A2, B2, C2 without alternation), Morphology (set A with plural formation, an inflectional process, vs. set C with abstract noun formation, a derivational process), and Stress pattern (set A with first syllable stress vs. set B with second syllable stress). The experimental paradigm was based on repetition priming with visual-input lexical decision. Alternation had a clear effect on the lexical decision time, while Morphology (in the specific manifestation of this parameter) was virtually ineffective and Stress had a minor effect. The materials in experiment 2 consisted of two sets of adjectives contrasting with respect to Alternation (D1 vs. D2), presented in three forms: base-form, inflected (plural) and derived (the corresponding abstract noun). The results of experiment 2 substantially replicate those of experiment 1. The converging results of experiments 1 and 2 offer themselves to a relatively straightforward interpretation. The Bulgarian participants showed a sharp inclination towards full listing, i.e. direct access, of the morphologically modified forms (both inflected and derived) of morphophonologically complex, thus opaque, alternating words. By contrast, the morphologically modified forms of non-alternating, transparent words were clearly processed compositionally. As for the contrast inflection/derivation, although the specific instantiation of this opposition did not prove to directly yield a statistical difference, its interplay with the morphophonological complication implied by the process of vowel/O alternation produced a relatively clear effect in terms of lexical decision speed. Finally, the combination of vowel alternation and second syllable stress, involving replacement of the stressed vowel in morphologically modified forms, seemed to enhance the intimations of direct access.

The Idealization of Contingency in Traditional Japanese Aesthetics

In many popular writings that date from initial decades of twentieth century, and also in recent scholarly studies, aesthetics-insofar as we can speak sweepingly of a complicated, multidimensional, and dynamic historical phenomenon-is characterized with a set of adjectives whose present linguistic entrenchment is clearly evident. Specifically we read that traditional Japanese aesthetics is an aesthetics of imperfection, insufficiency, incompleteness, asymmetry, and irregularity, not to mention perishability, suggestiveness, and simplicity.1 Given this collection of qualities, we are presented with a matching set of paradigmatic Japanese aesthetic experiences and objects, both as illustrations and as legitimations of this close-to-standard portrait. Examples include suggestive moon covered by drifting clouds, irregularly formed ceramics of ceremonial teacups, simple and asymmetrical arrangement of unpolished rocks in dry landscape garden, bold and dashing monochromatic strokes typical of Zen calligraphy, transient cherry blossoms, serene and cloud-capped mountain summits, lonely thatched huts, sunsets in foggy twilight, call of a crane that breaks through silence, and light autumn rain that drizzles upon a secluded pond. Upon further reflection, it becomes noticeable that some familiar Japanese aesthetic objects do not easily conform to this standard picture, and this raises doubts about typical characterization of Japanese aesthetics. The quintessentially Japanese shoji screens and tatami mats, for instance, are uniformly rectangular rather than irregular in form. They are, moreover, neither asymmetrical, nor imperfect, nor incomplete, nor insufficient. How then, can these perfectly regular screens and mats-items crucial to aesthetics of Japanese domestic architecture-fit neatly into usually encountered portrait of traditional Japanese aesthetics, if it is said to be fundamentally the worship of imperfection?2 Or similarly if imperfection is

Development and initial validation of the Hangover Symptoms Scale: prevalence and correlates of Hangover Symptoms in college students.

Despite its ubiquity, hangover has received remarkably little systematic attention in alcohol research. This may be due in part to the lack of a standard measure of hangover symptoms that cleanly taps the physiologic and subjective effects commonly experienced the morning after drinking. In the present study, we developed and evaluated a new scale, the Hangover Symptoms Scale (HSS), to potentially fill this void. Participants were 1230 currently drinking college students (62% women, 91% Caucasian). They were administered a self-report inventory in which they reported the frequency of occurrence of 13 different hangover symptoms during the past 12 months. Participants also reported their history of alcohol involvement, alcohol-related problems, and family history of alcohol-related problems. On average, participants experienced 5 out of 13 different hangover symptoms in the past year; the three most common symptoms were feeling extremely thirsty/dehydrated, feeling more tired than usual, and headache. Higher scores on the HSS were significantly positively associated with the frequency of drinking and getting drunk and the typical quantity of alcohol consumed when drinking, a personal history of alcohol-related problems, and a family history of alcohol-related problems. After controlling for sex differences in alcohol involvement, women had higher scores on the HSS than men. The HSS appears to capture a reasonably valid set of adjectives describing common hangover effects. It is hoped that the availability of a brief, valid hangover assessment such as the HSS will encourage further study of hangover's frequency, correlates, and consequences. Future research is needed to explore the performance of a re-worded HSS in laboratory settings, which may help bridge the gap between laboratory and survey investigations of hangover.

Perceived personality associations with differences in sense of humor: Stereotypes of hypothetical others with high or low senses of humor

Abstract Having a high sense of humor has been found to be a general social asset, but there has been no assessment of the specific qualities that are assumed to be associated with variations in sense of humor. Two studies were conducted to examine the assumptions observers would make about the personal qualities associated with varying levels of sense of humor. In the first study, participants (150 female and 86 male college students) were asked to use a set of adjectives to rate individuals described as varying in sense of humor. The overall pattern of results indicated that, compared to persons described as “typical” or “below average” in sense of humor, individuals described as “well above average” were rated more highly on socially desirable adjectives, lower on socially undesirable adjectives, but no different on adjectives reflecting social sensitivity. In the second study, participants (120 female and 49 male college students) were asked to use a measure of the “big five” personality traits to rate individuals described as varying in sense of humor. Results indicated that individuals described as being “well above average” in sense of humor were perceived as lower in neuroticism and higher in agreeableness than “typical”, or “below average” sense of humor others. The findings of these two studies confirm the importance of a high sense of humor as a social asset, and provide some clarity concerning the likely underlying bases for the positive expectations sense of humor generates in observers.

Looking for a Simple Big Five Factorial Structure in the Domain of Adjectives* * The original data upon which this paper is based are available at www.hhpub.com/journals/ejpa

Summary: The Big Five factors structure is currently the benchmark for personality dimensions. In the domain of adjectives, various instruments have been developed to measure the Big Five. In this contribution we propose a methodology to find a simple factorial structure and we apply this methodology to the domain of Big Five as measured by adjectives. Using data collected on a sample of 337 subjects, we propose a five-factor benchmark structure derived from the 50 best marker adjectives selected among the adjectives contained in three instruments specifically developed to measure the Big Five (i.e., Goldberg 's 100 adjectives list, IASR-B5, and SACBIF). We use this common factor structure (or benchmark structure) to investigate the differences and the similarities between the three operationalizations of the Big Five, and to investigate the placements of the full set of adjectives contained in the three instruments. The main features of the proposed methodology and the generalizability of the obtained results are discussed.

A hierarchical faceted model of the Big Five

The Five-Factor Model (FFM) is nowadays the personality structure which has reached the highest consensus among researchers. Although there exists agreement on its general features, there are some controversies regarding its specific features. With this contribution we intend to add a ‘little brick’ to the unfolding of the FFM. We propose a multifaceted organization of the Big Five and a methodological approach to reach this aim. Using a sample of 961 subjects and a data set of 116 adjectives, 22 facets were empirically developed. They proved to be reliable, convergent, discriminable, and coherent in meaning. When factor analysed together, they reproduced a clear FFM. Moreover, they proved to lie at the narrower core of their factor. To develop these facets we performed a series of principal-component analyses with Promax rotation on a set of adjectives already selected as lying in the core of the factors (i.e. a less than 30° distance from the factor). These facets and this methodology can help to bring out the more prototypical elements of the Big Five: a hierarchical multifaceted FFM is advocated as an approach that refines knowledge about the Big Five. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A possible genetic basis of accuracy in personality perception

An analysis was conducted to assess whether individuals are more accurate in perceiving those personality characteristics of other' that have a larger genetic component. Adult monozygotic (MZ) twins (63 pairs) and same-sex dizygotic (DZ) twins (35 pairs) completed the Personality Research Form-E (PRF) and the Sibling Evaluation of Personality Characteristics (SEPC) which consists of 20 sets of adjectives corresponding to the 20 trait scales of the PRF. Subjects also evaluated their co-twin with the SEPC. Self-other agreement correlations were then correlated with the heritability estimates of the PRF traits calculated on the same twin sample. The results suggest that accuracy in perceiving the co-twin's personality does increase with the heritability component of the personality dimension.

The heritability of characteristics associated with dispositional empathy.

This investigation used data from Loehlin and Nichols's (1976) study of over 800 sets of twins to examine evidence for the heritability of three facets of empathy: empathic concern, personal distress, and perspective taking. Expert judges first identified sets of adjectives, included within Loehlin and Nichols's original data, which reflected each empathy construct; these items were then validated in an independent sample. Comparisons of the responses given to these items by identical and fraternal twins in the Loehlin and Nichols investigation revealed evidence of significant heritability for characteristics associated with the two affective facets of empathy--empathic concern and personal distress--but not for the nonaffective construct of perspective taking. This pattern is consistent with the view that temperamental emotionality may underlie the heritability of affective empathy.

Verbal Attributes of Simultaneous Wind Instrument Timbres: II. Adjectives Induced from Piston's "Orchestration"

Experiments were conducted to explore the relationship between wind instrument dyad timbres and verbal attributes drawn from the musicological literature in order to compare and contrast results with studies using artificial stimuli and amusical rating scales. In the first experiment, all adjectives in Piston's (1955) "Orchestration" were collated and subsequently reduced to 61 examples. A checklist procedure was used in response to the dyad timbres to further reduce the set of adjectives to 21. The 21 adjectives were used in verbal attribute magnitude estimation of the 10 wind instrument dyad timbres. Principal components analysis of ratings revealed four verbal attribute factors, accounting for 90.604% of the variance: power, strident, plangent, and reed. Correlational analyses demonstrated an improvement in mapping between the ratings and perceptual similarity spaces over the procedure used in Part I of this study. The two-dimensional timbral circumplex was interpreted as having a principal dimension of nasality versus richness and a secondary dimension of reediness versus brilliance.

Une Classification Formelle des Adjectifs Psychologiques en Coreen

In this work, we have tried to describe a set of adjectives which includes a large majority of those adjectives semantically termed psychological, by making use of the following syntactic relation: (Qu P)0 N1-e Ad) [(Qu P)0 be Adj Prep N1] = N1 (Qu P)0-fo Adj N1be Adj Prep (Qu P)0] We discuss most particularly: the construction in which the complement clause can be replaced by a noun phrase, possibly containing the reflexive pronoun caki; the construction with a double N-i, the one described most frequently in the literary tradition; and finally two related verbal constructions of the following type: N1 (Qu P)0-Acc Adf-6 Vop [N1 V(find) (Qu P)0 Adj°] = (Qu P)0 N1-Acc Adj1-ke Vop [(Qu P)0 V(make) N1 Adj1] Our formal criterion characterizes about 150 psychological adjectives that have a certain semantic and syntactic homogeneity : they all express "a feeling activated by the Qu P and felt by the Nhum". However, we observe another set of adjectives semantically close to the first which nevertheless do not accept the complement clause construction with -lo: we term them evaluative adjectives. One of the major differences between these two classes is the absence of causativity in the complement clause of the evaluative adjectives. The study of psychological adjectives should be extended by other studies, in particular studies of psychological verbs that have no morphological relationship to adjectives, and which are defined in turn by appropriate formal criteria.

Informativeness and the learning of bipolar adjectives.

The effects of informativeness upon the learning of bipolar adjectives were examined by asking 20 preschoolers to learn novel words descriptive of different lengths vs tensions of a coiled spring. The set of adjectives which contrasted most highly for informativeness showed the greatest asymmetry for successful learning.