The ‘nouniness’ of attributive adjectives and ‘verbiness’ of predicative adjectives : Evidence from phonology

Hollmann, Willem (2021) The ‘nouniness’ of attributive adjectives and ‘verbiness’ of predicative adjectives : Evidence from phonology. English Language and Linguistics, 25 (2). pp. 257-279. ISSN 1360-6743

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Abstract

This article investigates prototypically attributive versus predicative adjectives in English in terms of the phonological properties that have been associated especially with nouns versus verbs in a substantial body of psycholinguistic research (e.g. Kelly 1992) - often ignored in theoretical linguistic work on word classes. Inspired by Berg's (2000, 2009) 'cross-level harmony constraint', the hypothesis I test is that prototypically attributive adjectives not only align more with nouns than with verbs syntactically, semantically and pragmatically, but also phonologically - and likewise for prototypically predicative adjectives and verbs. I analyse the phonological structure of frequent adjectives from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), and show that the data do indeed support the hypothesis. Berg's 'cross-level harmony constraint' may thus apply not only to the entire word classes noun, verb and adjective, but also to these two adjectival subclasses. I discuss several theoretical issues that emerge. The facts are most readily accommodated in a usage-based model, such as Radical Construction Grammar (Croft 2001), where these adjectives are seen as forming two distinct but overlapping classes. Drawing also on recent research by Boyd & Goldberg (2011) and Hao (2015), I explore the possible nature and emergence of these classes in some detail.

Item Type:
Journal Article
Journal or Publication Title:
English Language and Linguistics
Additional Information:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/english-language-and-linguistics/article/abs/nouniness-of-attributive-adjectives-and-verbiness-of-predicative-adjectives-evidence-from-phonology/A2C7505E2EC59125151E4722CC0829A4 The final, definitive version of this article has been published in the Journal, English Language and Linguistics, 25, (2), pp 257-279 2021, ©2020 Cambridge University Press.
Uncontrolled Keywords:
/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/1200/1203
Subjects:
?? adjectivesphonologyword classesacquisitionradical construction grammarlanguage and linguisticslinguistics and language ??
ID Code:
140115
Deposited By:
Deposited On:
07 Jan 2020 13:15
Refereed?:
Yes
Published?:
Published
Last Modified:
26 Feb 2024 00:42