Types Of Nouns Research Articles

Nominal participles, a case of categorial alternance: Eventive nominalizations in "-da"

The purpose of this paper is to present a first approximation to the description of the formation and behavior of a type of deverbal noun in Spanish, formed as of the suffixation of a morpheme -da (feminine '-ed') to a verbal base, which is very productive in Spanish. As it will be shown, the suffixation of this morpheme gives rise to eventive and resultative nominalizations as well as object nouns. Here, I focus on the first case and I assume that this kind of nominalization is a subset of deverbal nouns in -do ('-ed'), given that both types share morphological, semantic and syntactic properties.

Personality terms of abuse in three cultures: type nouns between description and insult

In this study terms of abuse are investigated in three different cultures. Spontaneous verbal aggression is to a certain extent reminiscent of the values of a certain culture. One hundred and ninety‐two male subjects from Spain, Germany and the Netherlands were asked to write down terms of abuse that they would use given a certain stimulus situation, and in addition to give their rating of the offensive character of those terms. A total set of 830 useful expressions was thus collected. The frequencies of the expressions were established, and the total list of expressions was categorized in terms of what they were about. In Spanish abusive language is typically about family and relations, in Germany it is typically about anal aspects, and in the Netherlands it is mainly about genitals. Explanations are provided in terms of dimensions on which the three cultures differ. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Quantité et qualité dans les pléonasmes : le rôle des adjectifs

How but also why tie up pleonasms with semantic universals as quantification and qualification ? By showing that in structures containing sequences of the type Noun + attributive adjective (“adjectif épithète” in French), the latter ensures completely its semantic function : either by quantifying with an intensive value, either by simply characterizing the Noun, rather from the speaker’s standpoint and not by its notional content, either again by identifying a part of the entire “Time” set. Thus, adjectives are efficient in descriptions and they depict the speaker’s conception of the “objective” reality. Pleonasms relate the world, indeed in a different manner, but they do not relate tautology

Processing of disyllabic compound words in Chinese aphasia: Evidence for the processing limitations account

The current study addresses the debate between so-called `structural' and `processing limitation' accounts of aphasia, i.e., whether language impairments reflect the `loss' of linguistic knowledge or its representations, or instead reflect a limitation in processing resources. Confrontation-naming task and category-judgment tasks were used to examine and compare the performance of non-fluent and fluent aphasics on different compound types of nouns and verbs. We demonstrate that aphasic patients' performance is modulated by the canonicity of the particular compound type, a result that holds true even for the category in which patients show a `selective category deficit.' These findings weigh against the `loss' of linguistic representations as the underlying cause of noun–verb deficits, instead supporting a `processing limitations' approach.

개체유형 명사와 동사 '-하-'의 결합에 관한 생성어휘부 이론적 접근

This paper aims to account for direct combination of an entity type noun with the verb HA- ``do`` (ex. piano-rul ha- ``piano-ACC do``) in Korean, based on Generative Lexicon Theory (Pustejovsky, 1995). The verb HA-``do`` coerces some entity type nouns (e.g., pap ``boiled rice``) into event type ones, by virtue of the qualia of the nouns. Typically, a telic-based type coercion supplies individual predication to the HA-construction and an agentive-based type coercion evokes a stage-level interpretation. Type coercion has certain constraints on the choice of qualia. We further point out that qualia cannot be a warehouse of pragmatic information. Qualia are composed of necessary information to explain the lattice structure of lexical meaning and co-occurrence constraints, distinct from accidental information. Finally, we seriously consider co-composition as an alternative to type coercion for the crucial operation of type shift. (Seoul National University)

Analysing stance in American and Spanish business management RAs : the case sentence-initial "retrospective labels"

When writing research articles (RAs), scholars can use certain lexico-grammatical traits that enable them to encode their attitudes, judgments and opinions, thus functioning as markers of stance. It is believed that sentenceinitial nouns preceded by a deictic -'retrospective labels' in Francis's terminology (1986, 1994)- can be considered one of those traits. The aim here is to explore whether there are any language-driven differences in the use of 'retrospective labels' as markers of stance within a particular disciplinary discourse, namely, Business Management. 'Retrospective labels' were analysed in a corpus of 12 Ras on the above-mentioned discipline, 6 in American English and 6 in Spanish. The focus is placed on the contrastive analysis of the frequency of use of these 'retrospective labels', the type of head nouns and modifiers which most frequently form part of them and the extent to which these 'retrospective labels' convey attitudinal meaning. As a general implication, it is believed that the differences drawn from analyses of this type should be borne in mind by Spanish Business Management scholars when writing their RAs in English.

On metaphorical designation of humans, animals, plants and things in Serbian and English language

In this paper I examine compound names of plants, animals, human beings and other things in which at least one nominal component designates a part of the body or clothes, or some basic elements of houshold in Serbian and English. The object of my analysis are complex derivatives of the type (adjective noun) + suffix in Serbian and componds of the type noun's + noun, noun + noun and adjective + noun in English. I try to show that there is a difference in metaphorical designation of human beings and other living creatures and things by such compound nouns. My thesis is that the metathorical designation of human beings by such compounds is based on the symbolic meaning of some words and expressions while the designation of other things and beings relies on noticed similarity. In Serbian language such designation is provided by comples derivatives praznoglavac 'empty-headed person', tupoglavac 'dullard' debolokoiac 'callos person', golobradac 'young, inexperienced person' zutokljunac 'tledling' (fig), in English chicken liver, beetle brain birdbrain, bonehead, butterfingers, bigwig, blackleg, blue blood bluestocking, eat's paw, deadhead,fat-guts,fathead, goldbrick (kol) hardhat, hardhead, greenhorn, redcoat (ist), redneck (sl), thickhead, etc. Polisemous compounds like eat's paw lend support for this thesis because their designation of human beings is based on symbolic meaning of some words or expressions. I hypothesize that the direction and extend of the possible metaphorization of names may be accounted for by the following hierarchy (11) people - animals - plants - meterial things. Such hierarchy is well supported by the observations of Lakoff (1987) and Taylor (1995) about the role of human body in early experience and perception ofthe reality. Different restrictions which may be imposed in the hierarchy (11) should be the matter of further study, some of which have been noted on this paper. The compounds of this type denoting people have metaphorically meaning conected with some pejorative uses. These compounds refer to some psychological or characteral features, and show that for the classification of people such features are much more important than physical properties. While the animals and plants are classified according to some charecteristics of their body parts, people are usually classified according to psychollogical characteristics or their social functions. I have also noted a difference in structure between compounds designation animals and those designating plants and other things. The designation of animals relies more on metonymy, and that of plants and other things on metaphor based on comparision of noticed similarities. In the compounds designating animals, the nominal component relatively seldom refers to the parts of plants or other things. I guess that the cause may be the fact that the anatomy of plants is very different from the anatomy of animals. As a consequence the structure adjective + noun is much more characteristic of the compounds designating animals in English than the structure noun's + noun, and the same holds, although in a lesser degree for the compounds designating humans. It is also noticeable that in English compounds whose second component a part of body or clothes the first component rarely designates animals. On the other hand the compounds (9), in which the nominal head refers to some superordinate species, the first component often designates animal species, but usually of a very different kind. These data seem to lend support for Goldvarg & Gluksberg's thesis (1998) that metaforical interpretation is favoured if the nominal constituents denote quite different entities.

A morphological effect obtains for isolated words but not for words in sentence context

The effect of morphological complexity on word identification was studied in three experiments conducted in Finnish, employing the same set of target nouns. In Experiment 1, the target nouns were presented in isolation, and lexical decision times were employed as lexical access measures. In Experiments 2 and 3, the same words were embedded in sentence contexts, where both the inflected and non-inflected forms were equally plausible, and eye fixation patterns (Exp. 2) and lexical decision latencies (Exp. 3) were recorded. The experiment with isolated words replicated previous lexical decision studies by showing more effortful processing for inflected than monomorphemic nouns. However, this morphological complexity effect did not generalise to the context experiments; fixation durations and response latencies were highly similar for inflected and monomorphemic words. It is suggested that, at least for the type of inflected nouns studied, the morphological effect observed for isolated words may derive from the syntactic and/or semantic level and not necessarily from the lexical level, as previously assumed.

Individuals, kinds and events: classifier coercion of nouns

This paper challenges the traditional view that nominal classifiers classify individuals. Instead, we suggest that classifiers coerce nouns to refer to kinds and events as well as to individuals. This finding argues against the view that nouns refer only to entities, and suggests that classifiers do not simply agree with a noun, but instead coerce a particular meaning from it. Moreover, the Mandarin classifier system creates a taxonomic system involving events, kinds and individuals respectively. Within each classifier type an independent classification system of the collocating noun type is created. These findings are important first because they emphasize that the understanding of the semantics of nouns involves more than simple reference to an individual entity. Second, it is the first time that the previously abstract semantic distinctions among kinds, individuals and events, as well as within kinds and within events, have been found to be instantiated in a particular system of a natural language grammar, namely, the classifier system.

‘Abbreviated nouns’ in African languages: a morphological, semantic and lexicographic perspective

This article focuses on morphological and semantic analysis as well as lexicographic treatment of a specific type of compound noun whose initial part is a so-called ‘abbreviated noun’, which in the case of Zulu is -so- or -no- and in Sepedi is ra- or ma-. It will be argued that these nouns have become grammaticalised forms which have lost their status as fully fledged lexical items, and have, through metaphorical usage and a subsequent process of desemanticisation, been reanalysed as grammatical units used productively to coin new words. A semantic continuum will be postulated representing the semantic range, or even shift, of these abbreviated nouns from the original meanings ‘father/mother of, as one extreme through’ owner of or ‘having special skills/characteristics’ to ‘occupation’ as the other extreme. Finally, various suggestions will be made for the alternative lexicographic treatment of transparent versus non-transparent forms, according to a transparency continuum.

Noun versus verb emphasis in Italian mother-to-child speech.

This paper examines naturalistic adult-to-child speech produced by 15 Italian middle-class mothers to determine which specific patterns characterize linguistic input to children at 1;4 and 1;8. Since Italian is a pro-drop language, we expect that adult-to-child speech will show a bias towards a more salient semantic and morphological significance of verbs relative to nouns. We expect that verbs will more likely occupy the sentence-initial position, and have more morphological inflections relative to nouns. Mother-to-child speech was coded for type and token frequency, utterance position, and morphological variation of nouns and verbs. The results confirm our predictions. Namely, Italian-speaking mothers produced verb types and tokens more frequently than noun types and tokens, they placed verbs more frequently than nouns in salient utterance position, and they morphologically marked verb stems more than noun stems.

‘Presupposition can be a bluff’: How abstract nouns can be used as presupposition triggers

This study is concerned with expressions of the type the thing is that … or the problem was that …, which are seen as constructions in the Construction Grammar sense of the term and referred to as ‘N- be-that-constructions’. The material discussed is derived from the 225-million word British section of COBUILD's Bank of English corpus. It is shown that depending on the types of nouns that they use, speakers can exploit the N- be-that-construction in the service of an array of presuppositions, among them existential and factive semantic ones as well as pragmatic ones. Special attention is devoted to two pragmatic presuppositions: first, the expectation that more specific information about the unspecific discourse entity introduced by the abstract nouns is to come in the that-clause; and second, the impression, created by the information distribution of the N- be-that-construction and its focusing function, that the initial noun phrase represents given information which is known to all discourse participants. It is argued that the latter type of pragmatic presupposition can be exploited for bluffs insofar as it allows speakers to purport information as given which is in fact new. Bluffs of this type are often combined with evidential downtoning ( my feeling is that …) or upgrading ( the truth is that …), and with the objectivization of the proposition expressed in the that-clause by backgrounding the speaker role ( the hope is that … rather than my hope is that).

The Role of Diminutives in the Acquisition of Russian Gender: Can Elements of Child‐Directed Speech Aid in Learning Morphology?

Diminutives are a pervasive feature of child‐directed speech (CDS) in Russian. Their frequent use might be beneficial for gender acquisition because it eliminates nontransparent morphophonological marking. To examine the effect of diminutives on gender learning, adult native speakers of English were taught Russian nouns, with half of the participants trained on diminutive nouns and half on the nondiminutive base forms. Over four sessions, participants learned to use adjectives that had to agree in gender with nouns. Learners were then tested on various types of novel nouns. The diminutive training group demonstrated better learning of noun gender, and better generalization to novel forms, indicating that regularization of gender marking through diminutives promotes the extraction of morphophonological regularities.

A Corpus-Based Learning Method of Compound Noun Indexing Rules for Korean

In Korean information retrieval, compound nouns play an important role in improving precision in search experiments. There are two major approaches to compound noun indexing in Korean: statistical and linguistic. Each method, however, has its own shortcomings, such as limitations when indexing diverse types of compound nouns, over-generation of compound nouns, and data sparseness in training. In this paper, we propose a corpus-based learning method, which can index diverse types of compound nouns using rules automatically extracted from a large corpus. The automatic learning method is more portable and requires less human effort, although it exhibits a performance level similar to the manual-linguistic approach. We also present a new filtering method to solve the problems of compound noun over-generation and data sparseness.

Lexical diversity and productivity in Cantonese-speaking children with specific language impairment.

Recent studies of lexical diversity in English-speaking children with specific language impairment (ESLI) have produced conflicting results. Differences between SLI and age-matched (AM) groups on verb types, and overall types have been reported, as have differences between SLI and language-matched (LM) groups on verb types and/or verb tokens, and noun types and noun tokens. At the same time there have been other claims that there is no difference between SLI and LM groups in terms of lexical diversity. This comparison of the lexical diversity of Cantonese-speaking children with SLI (CSLI) and their language-matched peers controlled the length of the samples and the number of tokens as the basis for comparison. There was no difference between the groups in use of verb tokens or types, but there were significant differences in noun tokens and types and 'other' open class tokens and types. Although there was no difference between the groups in the use of a specific grammatical marker (aspect markers), the way in which the CSLI children deployed these markers was severely restricted in comparison with their LM peers. A limited capacity model of language production is invoked to explain the findings.

Lexical retrieval of complex predicates in an agrammatic aphasic subject's sentence production

In this paper we report on the investigation of those factors whichhave a role in the lexical selection of complex predicates, verbal modifier+verbconstructions, in the sentence production of a Hungarian agrammatic Broca'saphasic speaker. Two variables were investigated (i) the lexical representationalcomplexity of VM+V units: the target complex predicates contained a prefixalpreverb or argumental preverbs and (ii) syntactic complexity of the sentencesinto which the complex predicates were mapped: the target sentences were neu-tral and non-neutral sentences. Two methods were used, sentence anagram andsentence repetition tasks. The results indicate that the vulnerable part ofthe complex predicate is the Verbal Modifier part. In reproducing sentencesverbatim, VM errors occurred in higher proportion than base V errors. VM omissionand substitution errors were found only in non-neutral sentences and in neutralsentences modified by a sentential adverb. In sentences containing operatorsa verb movement effect was found: the proportion of VM substitution errorswas significantly higher in those sentences which contained focussed, wh-and negated constituents. Error rates of VMs were much lower in sentenceswhich contained universal quantifier phrases. The data suggest that the lexicalretrieval of complex predicates correlates with a syntactic operation, verbmovement to F. It can be assumed that there is a trade-off between the lexicalretrieval of complex predicates and the use of verb raising to Focus head,if the resource capacity is limited within the impaired sentence productionsystem. Verb movement to F can be achieved at the cost of incomplete lexicalaccess to complex predicates. The semantic type of VMs also had an efiecton the lexical retrieval of complex predicates: prefixed verbs are less vulnerablethan complex predicates containing argumental preverbs, predicative complementand bare noun types of verbal modifiers.

Putting the “Noun Bias” in Context: A Comparison of English and Mandarin

Recently, researchers have been debating whether children exhibit a universal “noun bias” when learning a first language. The present study compares the proportions of nouns and verbs in the early vocabularies of 24 English‐ and 24 Mandarin‐speaking toddlers (M age = 20 months) and their mothers. Three different methods were used to measure the proportion of noun types, relative to verb types: controlled observations in three contexts (book reading, mechanical toy play, regular toy play), identical across languages; a vocabulary checklist (MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory); and mothers' reporting of their children's “first words.” Across all measures, Mandarin‐speaking children were found to have relatively fewer nouns and more verbs than English‐speaking children. However, context itself played an important role in the proportions of nouns found in children's vocabularies, such that, regardless of the language spoken, children's vocabularies appeared dominated by nouns when they were engaged in book reading, but not when they were playing with toys. Mothers' speech to children showed the same language differences (relatively more verbs in Mandarin), although both Mandarin‐ and English‐speaking mothers produced relatively more verbs than their children. In sum, whether or not language‐learning toddlers demonstrate a “noun bias” depends on a variety of factors, including the methods by which their vocabularies are sampled and the contexts in which observations occur.

Gender processing in native and nonnative Russian speakers

Traditional computational accounts of gender representation and learning (e.g., Carroll, 1989, 1995) differ radically from cue-based and connectionist accounts. The latter but not the former predicts that access to noun gender will vary depending on the reliability of noun endings (and other sublexical elements and morphological constituents) in marking gender, and that agreement markers can be used strategically to constrain the genders of ambiguously marked nouns. Adult native (L1) speakers of Russian (Experiment 1) and advanced nonnative (L2) speakers (Experiment 2) read Russian sentences on a computer and were asked to choose one of two inflected past tense verbs in a forced choice task. The verbs either matched or mismatched the gender of the subject NP. Half of the target trials used opaque (end-palatalized) subject nouns, which were ambiguously marked for gender, and the other half used transparent (regularly marked) subject nouns. Noun type was crossed with the presence or absence of a gender-marked adjective in the subject NP. When an adjective was present in the subject NP, both L1 and L2 speakers were significantly faster at reading and selecting the correct verb form. L2 but not L1 speakers showed longer reading and choice latencies and made more errors when the subject noun was opaque. The data showed that L2 speakers used adjective inflections to disambiguate the gender of opaque subject nouns and to select gender appropriate verb inflections. The accuracy data for L1 and L2 speakers were tested against several connectionist models. The models' success in accounting for the data suggested that L1 and L2 speakers may depend on a common learning mechanism and thus resemble one another at the computational level, contrary to traditional computational accounts (Carroll, 1989, 1995).

Deficits in finite verb morphology: some assumptions in recent accounts of specific language impairment.

The grammatical morphology deficits common in children with specific language impairment (SLI) are characterized in some models as linguistic deficits. Such models must assume some mechanism for correct productions of finite verb forms. Three such assumptions were tested by analyzing speech samples from 18 children with SLI (aged 3 years 6 months to 6 years 9 months). Assumption 1, that nonfinite forms are used consistently until replaced by memorized finite forms, was tested by examining the distribution of verb types in present third-person singular and noun types in present third-person singular contractible copula contexts. Significantly more word types than expected were inflected inconsistently. Both Assumption 2, that finite and nonfinite verb forms are memorized but used indiscriminately, and Assumption 3, that affixation rules are applied indiscriminately, predict random use of finite forms. This prediction was not supported.

Type nouns and the five factor model of personality description

Research in the tradition of the lexical approach has been largely confined to adjective rating scales. Another word class that appears particularly suited for personality description is the class of type nouns (e.g. extravert, misanthrope, leader, coward, intellectual). This paper presents the first investigation in the factorial structure of a relatively large set of German type nouns. Stimulus persons were 12 prominent males (e.g. Boris Becker, Helmut Kohl) and 12 prominent females (e.g. Claudia Schiffer, Steffi Graf). Raters were 240 men and 240 women. Each rater judged one stimulus person on 192 unipolar type noun scales and 32 bipolar adjective scales. Factor analyses of the type nouns yielded seven factors for males and six for females. These factors represented a clear‐cut and meaningful personality structure. Comparisons with the adjective factors (seven male and six female) demonstrated that the noun factors show some resemblance to the Big Five and Physical Attractiveness. Multiple regression analyses showed that the noun factors cannot be completely reduced to the Big Five. Some systematic differences between male and female stimuli are also discussed. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.