<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=windows-1252"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;">Thanks for your insight, Dan (and all).<div> </div><div>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 < >.</div><div> </div><div>Thanks so much for your help. Much appreciated! <div> <div style="font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; orphans: 2; widows: 2; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;"> --</div><div style="font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; orphans: 2; widows: 2; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;">T.J. Trimble</div> </div> <div><div>On May 5, 2014, at 4:53 PM, Dan Flickinger <<a href="mailto:danf@stanford.edu">danf@stanford.edu</a>> wrote:</div> <blockquote type="cite">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" <<a href="mailto:ebender@uw.edu">ebender@uw.edu</a>> To: "Dan Flickinger" <<a href="mailto:danf@stanford.edu">danf@stanford.edu</a>> Cc: "Woodley Packard" <<a href="mailto:sweaglesw@sweaglesw.org">sweaglesw@sweaglesw.org</a>>, "developers" <<a href="mailto:developers@delph-in.net">developers@delph-in.net</a>>, "T.J. Trimble" <<a href="mailto:trimblet@me.com">trimblet@me.com</a>> 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 <<a href="mailto:danf@stanford.edu">danf@stanford.edu</a>> wrote: <blockquote type="cite">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" <<a href="mailto:ebender@uw.edu">ebender@uw.edu</a>> To: "Dan Flickinger" <<a href="mailto:danf@stanford.edu">danf@stanford.edu</a>> Cc: "Woodley Packard" <<a href="mailto:sweaglesw@sweaglesw.org">sweaglesw@sweaglesw.org</a>>, "developers" < <a href="mailto:developers@delph-in.net">developers@delph-in.net</a>>, "T.J. Trimble" <<a href="mailto:trimblet@me.com">trimblet@me.com</a>> 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 <<a href="mailto:danf@stanford.edu">danf@stanford.edu</a>> wrote: <blockquote type="cite">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, </blockquote>that <blockquote type="cite">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 </blockquote>predicative <blockquote type="cite">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 </blockquote>is a <blockquote type="cite">"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 </blockquote>which <blockquote type="cite">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) </blockquote>to <blockquote type="cite">do with pragmatics. Dan ----- Original Message ----- From: "Woodley Packard" <<a href="mailto:sweaglesw@sweaglesw.org">sweaglesw@sweaglesw.org</a>> To: "T.J. Trimble" <<a href="mailto:trimblet@me.com">trimblet@me.com</a>> Cc: <a href="mailto:developers@delph-in.net">developers@delph-in.net</a> 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 </blockquote>string <blockquote type="cite">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 </blockquote>on <blockquote type="cite">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" <<a href="mailto:trimblet@me.com">trimblet@me.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote type="cite">So, two related questions about the ERG or about these sort of </blockquote>constructions in other grammars/languages: <blockquote type="cite"> 1) Are there any examples of the MOD value of these predicative only </blockquote>adjectives being utilized? <blockquote type="cite"> 2) Is there any compelling reason to use PRD +/– to constrain this </blockquote>instead of MOD < >? </blockquote> -- Emily M. Bender Associate Professor Department of Linguistics Check out CLMS on facebook! <a href="http://www.facebook.com/uwclma">http://www.facebook.com/uwclma</a> </blockquote> -- Emily M. Bender Associate Professor Department of Linguistics Check out CLMS on facebook! <a href="http://www.facebook.com/uwclma">http://www.facebook.com/uwclma</a> </blockquote></div> </div></body></html>