[developers] MOD value in predicative only adjectives

[Emily M. Bender]

Thanks, Dan!
Emily


On Tue, May 6, 2014 at 2:12 AM, T.J. Trimble <trimblet at me.com> wrote:

> Thanks for your insight, Dan (and all).
>
> I think the insight that English “predicative only” adjectives can appear
> postnominally in English is certainly an interesting one, but I do think it
> makes sense to make them MOD < >. I think of languages, for instance, that
> don’t seem to have attributive adjectives at all (WALS estimates <1% of
> languages): it certainly seems right to mark these adjectives as MOD < >.
>
> Thanks so much for your help. Much appreciated!
>
> --
> T.J. Trimble
>
> On May 5, 2014, at 4:53 PM, Dan Flickinger <danf at stanford.edu> wrote:
>
> Hi again, Emily -
>
> It seems reasonable to me to draw the distinctions cross-linguistically as
> you suggest, with POSTHEAD determining the position of an adjective
> relative to the noun it modifies, and the presence or absence of
> handle-sharing used to distinguish attributives from predicatives, using
> your definition of predicatives.  While this approach misses the (nearly
> true) generalization that in English those adjectivals (words or phrases)
> that can appear postnominally can also appear with the copula, it does seem
> plausible that this may be just an idiosyncracy of English, and hence not
> relevant for the Matrix grammar.  Note that not all of the attributive
> adjectives in English can appear postnominally if phrasal, although for
> most that is enough: "mere", "foster", and "countless" are examples of
> stubbornly pre-nominal guys, so it seems that the POSTHEAD feature is
> well-motivated to mark such idiosyncracies lexically.
>
> If there are adjectives that cannot serve as modifiers, sure, why not make
> them MOD < >.  Some candidate lexical entries of this type in English
> include "so" meaning "true"  as in "Is that so?", "more so" as in "Kim was
> selfish and Sandy was even more so", and "over with" meaning "ended" as in
> "that meeting was over with by noon".  It's not so easy to defend these as
> adjectives rather than, say, some kind of PP, except that their semantics
> might be more adjective-like than PP-like.  But in languages with
> distinctive adjective inflection, it's easy to believe there are some that
> can only be predicative.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Dan
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Emily M. Bender" <ebender at uw.edu>
> To: "Dan Flickinger" <danf at stanford.edu>
> Cc: "Woodley Packard" <sweaglesw at sweaglesw.org>, "developers" <
> developers at delph-in.net>, "T.J. Trimble" <trimblet at me.com>
> Sent: Thursday, April 24, 2014 5:35:49 PM
> Subject: Re: [developers] MOD value in predicative only adjectives
>
> Hi Dan,
>
> Thank you for the further elaboration. I have been taking "attributive" to
> mean "attaches via the head-modifier rule" (and in the case of intersective
> guys, does the LTOP identification thing) as opposed to predicative meaning
> "attaches via the head-subject rule/or as complement of the copula" and
> does not do any LTOP sharing.  That is, in terms of a predominantly
> semantic distinction.  This is the distinction that I'd expect to find
> active crosslinguistically.  (In French, for example, there are pre-head
> and post-head attaching adjectives, but as far as I know, that distinction
> does not align with the ability to appear as the complement of the copula).
>
> Do the "a-" guys have the post-nominal modifier possibility?
>
> "Anything ablaze should be put out immediately."
> "Anyone still abed needs to get up now."
>
> (The second one of those two sounds better, but that could just be the
> weight thing again...)  Also, isn't it true that the ordinarily pre-nominal
> ones can be post-nominal if they're phrasal, so:
>
> "Anything other than that is off-limits."
> "Children teenage or younger must be supervised."
>
> (Here the second one is maybe suspect to me...)
>
> At any rate, it seems to me that there are two separate distinctions that
> happen to correlate in English (more or less) that I don't think we can
> count on correlating cross-linguistically.  I'd rather use POSTHEAD to
> control the direction of modification (in the Matrix) and save PRD for
> can/can't appear as the complement of the copula (or as the head of a
> sentence, depending on the language).  Do you see anywhere we'd run into
> trouble by using MOD < > to indicate adjectives that can't appear as
> modifiers?
>
> (You might then ask why call them adjectives if they can't appear as
> modifiers, either left or right, of nouns. I think the motivation would
> likely be morphological/relate to other distributional properties.  That
> is, imagine a language that has a class of things that all inflect the same
> way, form comparative/superlative constructions the same way, and take the
> same kind of degree modifiers. But some of those guys can be adnominal
> modifiers and some can't...)
>
> Emily
>
>
>
>
> On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 4:55 PM, Dan Flickinger <danf at stanford.edu> wrote:
>
> I'm not quite sure, Emily, what you mean by "potentially attributive".
> There are adjectives like "mere" that can only appear prenominally, and it
> is this positional ability that I associate with "attributive" adjectives.
> The other common places for adjectives are either as postnominal
> modifiers, or in the copula construction, and both of these I take to be
> characteristic of "predicative" adjectives.  Maybe I'm overlooking some
> other context in which an adjective like "mere" could occur, but I don't
> see it.  Hence the property [PRD -] exactly means "I only appear as a
> prenominal modifier" (equivalent to "I am an attributive adjective"), and
> [PRD +] means "I do not appear as a prenominal modifier, but I can
> (potentially) appear either postnominally, or with a copula" (equivalent to
> "I am a predicative adjective").  Adjectives like "afraid" are lexically
> constrained to be [PRD +].  Most adjectives are underspecified for PRD, and
> hence can behave as either attributive or predicative.  The ERG lexicon
> includes a large set of lexical entries of the attributive-adjective type,
> but the great majority of these are hyphenated phrases treated as
> multi-words (a kind of grammar hack), or are words like "downstream" that
> also have a predicative entry which might also serve as a VP-modifier, so I
> divide their work into "attribute adjective" and "lexical PP" (where PPs
> can only be post-head or appear with the copula).  Some other `true'
> attributives include "everyday", "foster", "future", "inner", "kindred",
> "lone", "mock", "other", "overall", "teenage", "utter", and maybe
> "veritable".  Some true "predicative-only" adjectives include "a-" guys
> like "abed", "afraid", "ablaze", etc., but also "galore" (probably not with
> copula), "so" meaning "true" as in "that is so", maybe "ready" meaning
> "prepared", where "a ready smile" has a different sense, and probaby "well"
> meaning "healthy".
>
> - Dan
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Emily M. Bender" <ebender at uw.edu>
> To: "Dan Flickinger" <danf at stanford.edu>
> Cc: "Woodley Packard" <sweaglesw at sweaglesw.org>, "developers" <
> developers at delph-in.net>, "T.J. Trimble" <trimblet at me.com>
> Sent: Thursday, April 24, 2014 4:08:44 PM
> Subject: Re: [developers] MOD value in predicative only adjectives
>
> Thanks for the clarification Dan.  I'm a bit puzzled about the distinction
> that PRD +/- marks then.  PRD - apparently doesn't mean "can't be
> attributive" (which is what we were taking it to mean) but rather "can't be
> a pre-nominal modifier".  Do you think that all adjectives must be
> potentially attributive, just not necessarily pre-nominally?
>
> (I don't have any examples of non-attributves off the top of my head.  I'm
> looking here for the counter part to "mere", which is attributive-only.)
>
> Emily
>
>
>
> On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 3:50 PM, Dan Flickinger <danf at stanford.edu> wrote:
>
> Hi T.J. (and Woodley) -
>
> As Woodley notes, there are two contexts in which predicative adjectives
> can appear:
> (1) in copula constructions as in |the ships are afloat|
> (2) as postnominal modifiers as in |the ships afloat reappeared|
>
> While you're right that the MOD value is unneeded for the copula use,
>
> that
>
> non-empty value is necessary for the postnominal use, since the ERG
> combines "ships" with "afloat" using a head-modifier construction.  Hence
> the boolean PRD feature is used to distinguish attributive from
>
> predicative
>
> adjectives, and not the MOD value.
>
> Woodley's example |the dogs awake arise| might sound awkward, but |anyone
> awake at that hour must be crazy| is impeccable, suggesting that there
>
> is a
>
> "heaviness" element involved in the acceptability of single-word
> post-nominal adjectives, and hence maybe something about information
> structure is at play.  However, even the single-word ones can sound fine:
> |the only rooms available are doubles|
> |the first person awake was the old man|
>
> As for Woodley's |I found the dogs awake|, this has several readings
>
> which
>
> may obscure the issue of postnominal modification -- one with the
> three-argument "find" as in |I found him (to be) amusing|, and one with
> transitive "find" and a "depictive" adjective, as in |I found the keys
> (while I was) blindfolded|.  Perhaps more to the immediate point is an
> example like |I fed the children awake at dawn an early breakfast|.  The
> awkwardness of |I fed the children awake an early breakfast| is, on my
> current view, not an issue of grammaticality, but something (mysterious)
>
> to
>
> do with pragmatics.
>
> Dan
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Woodley Packard" <sweaglesw at sweaglesw.org>
> To: "T.J. Trimble" <trimblet at me.com>
> Cc: developers at delph-in.net
> Sent: Thursday, April 24, 2014 2:16:32 PM
> Subject: Re: [developers] MOD value in predicative only adjectives
>
> Interesting question, T.J.; I would also like to know the answer to this
> one.  One side effect seems to be the prediction that the following
>
> string
>
> is grammatical:
>
> The dogs awake arise.
>
> i.e. the predicative-only adjective "awake" is allowed to modify
> post-nominally.  To me this is a surprising prediction; but maybe those
>
> on
>
> the list with more flexible minds won't have an issue with it.  Other
> constructions such as "I found the dogs awake." get their own analysis,
> with the "awake" predicate a scopal argument of "find," so they can't be
> the explanation here.
>
> -Woodley
>
>
> On Apr 24, 2014, at 1:57 PM, "T.J. Trimble" <trimblet at me.com> wrote:
>
> So, two related questions about the ERG or about these sort of
>
> constructions in other grammars/languages:
>
>
> 1) Are there any examples of the MOD value of these predicative only
>
> adjectives being utilized?
>
>
> 2) Is there any compelling reason to use PRD +/– to constrain this
>
> instead of MOD < >?
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> Emily M. Bender
> Associate Professor
> Department of Linguistics
> Check out CLMS on facebook! http://www.facebook.com/uwclma
>
>
>
>
> --
> Emily M. Bender
> Associate Professor
> Department of Linguistics
> Check out CLMS on facebook! http://www.facebook.com/uwclma
>
>
>


-- 
Emily M. Bender
Associate Professor
Department of Linguistics
Check out CLMS on facebook! http://www.facebook.com/uwclma
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