TY - JOUR

T1 - The ‘nouniness’ of attributive adjectives and ‘verbiness’ of predicative adjectives

T2 - Evidence from phonology

AU - Hollmann, Willem

N1 - 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.

PY - 2021/6/30

Y1 - 2021/6/30

N2 - 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.

AB - 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.

KW - adjectives

KW - phonology

KW - word classes

KW - acquisition

KW - Radical Construction Grammar

U2 - 10.1017/S1360674320000015

DO - 10.1017/S1360674320000015

M3 - Journal article

VL - 25

SP - 257

EP - 279

JO - English Language and Linguistics

JF - English Language and Linguistics

SN - 1360-6743

IS - 2

ER -