Hostname: page-component-6766d58669-7fx5l Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-05-24T16:39:20.256Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 March 2020

WILLEM B. HOLLMANN Open the ORCID record for WILLEM B. HOLLMANN [Opens in a new window]
WILLEM B. HOLLMANN*
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics & English Language, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YL, United Kingdom w.hollmann@lancaster.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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.

Keywords

adjectivesphonologyword classesacquisitionRadical Construction Grammar

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , June 2021 , pp. 257 - 279
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

This study contains analysis of existing data available from www.english-corpora.org/coca/ (10 December 2019). I am grateful to two anonymous reviewers and to the Editor, Bernd Kortmann, for their thoughtful comments. Any remaining inaccuracies are of course my own.

References

Aarts, Bas. 2007. Syntactic gradience: The nature of grammatical indeterminacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Albright, Adam. 2008. How many grammars am I holding up? Discovering phonological differences between word classes. In Chang, Charles B. & Haynie, Hannah J. (eds.), Proceedings of the 26th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, 1–20. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Anderson, John M. 1992. Linguistic representation. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anderson, John M. 2006. Structural analogy and universal grammar. Lingua 116, 601–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anderson, John M. 2011. Phonology–syntax analogies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Baillargeon, Renée. 1994. How do infants learn about the physical world? Current Directions in Psychological Science 3, 133–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berg, Thomas. 2000. The position of adjectives on the noun–verb continuum. English Language and Linguistics 4, 269–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berg, Thomas. 2009. Structure in language: A dynamic perspective. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Berg, Thomas & Koops, Christian. 2010. The interplay of left- and right-branching effects: A phonotactic analysis of Korean syllable structure. Lingua 120, 35–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bhat, Darbhe Narayana Shankara. 2004. The adjectival category: Criteria for differentiation and identification. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Johannson, Stieg, Leech, Geoffrey, Conrad, Susan & Finegan, Edward. 1999. Longman grammar of spoken and written English. New York: Longman.Google Scholar
Bolinger, Dwight. 1967. Adjectives in English: Attribution and predication. Lingua 18, 1–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boyd, Jeremy K. & Goldberg, Adele E.. 2011. Learning what not to say: Categorization and statistical preemption in a-adjective production. Language 87, 1–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carr, Philip. 2000. Scientific realism, sociophonetic variation, and innate endowments in phonology. In Burton-Roberts, Noel, Carr, Philip & Docherty, Gerard (eds.), Phonological knowledge: Conceptual and empirical issues, 67–104. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Carr, Philip. 2006. Universal grammar and syntax/phonology parallelisms. Lingua 116, 634–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carstairs-McCarthy, Andrew. 1999. The origins of complex language: An inquiry into the evolutionary beginnings of sentences, syllables, and truth. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Cassidy, Kimberly W. & Kelly, Michael H.. 1991. Phonological information for grammatical category assignment. Journal of Memory and Language 30, 348–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chafe, Wallace. 1982. Integration and involvement in speaking, writing, and oral literature. In Tannen, Deborah (ed.), Spoken and written language: Exploring orality and literacy, 35–53. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. 1981. Lectures on government and binding. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Clark, Eve V. 2004. How language acquisition builds on cognitive development. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8, 472–8.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Comrie, Bernard. 1975. Polite plurals and predicate agreement. Language 51, 406–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Croft, William. 1990. A conceptual framework for grammatical categories (or, a taxonomy of propositional acts). Journal of Semantics 7, 245–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Croft, William. 1991. Syntactic categories and grammatical relations: The cognitive organization of information. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Croft, William. 2001. Radical construction grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Croft, William. 2013. Morphosyntax. MS, Albuquerque, University of New Mexico.Google Scholar
Davies, Mark. 2008–. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): 560 million words, 1990–present. Available at https: //corpus.byu.edu/coca/ (accessed 15 June 2019).Google Scholar
Dingemanse, Mark, Blasi, Damián E., Lupyan, Gary, Christiansen, Morten H. & Monaghan, Padraic. 2015. Arbitrariness, iconicity and systematicity in language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 19, 603–15.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Don, Jan & Erkelens, Marian. 2008. Possible phonological cues in categorial acquisition: Evidence from adult categorization. Studies in Language 32, 670–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Farmer, Thomas A., Christiansen, Morten H. & Monaghan, Padraic. 2006. Phonological typicality influences on-line sentence comprehension. PNAS 103, 12203–08.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ferris, Connor. 1993. The meaning of syntax: A study in the adjectives of English. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Fukui, Naoki & Speas, Margaret. 1986. Specifiers and projections. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 8, 128–72.Google Scholar
Givón, Talmy. 1984. Syntax: A functional-typological introduction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Givón, Talmy. 2001. Syntax: An introduction, vol. I. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Goldberg, Adele E. & Boyd, Jeremy K.. 2015. A-adjectives, statistical pre-emption, and the evidence: Reply to Yang (2015). Language 91, e194–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Halliday, M. A. K. 1967. Intonation and grammar in British English. The Hague: Mouton.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hao, Jessica. 2015. Abstraction versus restriction in syntactic learning: An examination of children's acquisition of the a-adjective restriction. Unpublished senior thesis, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University.Google Scholar
Hollmann, Willem B. 2012. Word classes: Towards a more comprehensive usage-based account. Studies in Language 36, 671–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hollmann, Willem B. 2013. Nouns and verbs in Cognitive Grammar: Where is the ‘sound’ evidence? Cognitive Linguistics 24, 275–308.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hollmann, Willem B. 2014. What do adjectives sound like? Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Japanese Cognitive Linguistics Association 14, 749–54.Google Scholar
Honeybone, Patrick. 2008. Lenition, weakening and consonantal strength: Tracing concepts through the history of phonology. In de Carvalho, Joaquim Brandão, Scheer, Tobias & Ségéral, Philippe (eds.), Lenition and fortition, 9–93. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hopper, Paul J. & Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 2003. Grammaticalization, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kapović, Mate. 2017. Proto-Indo-European morphology. In Kapović, Mate (ed.), The Indo-European languages. Routledge Handbooks Online. Available at www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315678559.ch3 (accessed 15 June 2019).Google Scholar
Kelly, Michael H. 1992. Using sound to solve syntactic problems: The role of phonology in grammatical category assignments. Psychological Review 99, 349–64.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kelly, Michael H. 1996. The role of phonology in grammatical category assignment. In Morgan, James L. & Demuth, Katherine (eds.), From signal to syntax, 249–62. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Kelly, Michael H. & Bock, J. Kathryn 1988. Stress in time. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 14, 389–403.Google ScholarPubMed
Ladd, D. Robert. 2008. Intonational phonology, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ladefoged, Peter & Johnson, Keith. 2011. A course in phonetics, 6th edn. Boston, MA: Wadsworth.Google Scholar
Langacker, Ronald W. 1987. Foundations of cognitive grammar, vol. 1: Theoretical prerequisites. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Langacker, Ronald W. 2008. Cognitive grammar: A basic introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lieven, Elena, Salomo, Dorothé & Tomasello, Michael. 2009. Two-year-old children's production of multiword utterances: A usage-based analysis. Cognitive Linguistics 20, 481–508.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lohmann, Arne. 2017. Phonological properties of word classes and directionality in conversion. Word Structure 10, 204–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacWhinney, Brian. 2000. The CHILDES project: Tools for analysing talk, 3rd edn. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Monaghan, Padraic, Chater, Nick & Christiansen, Morten H.. 2005. The differential role of phonological and distributional cues in grammatical categorisation. Cognition 96, 143–82.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Monaghan, Padraic, Christiansen, Morten H. & Chater, Nick. 2007. The phonological-distributional coherence hypothesis: Cross-linguistic evidence in language acquisition. Cognitive Psychology 55, 259–305.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Monaghan, Padraic, Christiansen, Morten H. & Fitneva, Stanka A.. 2011. The arbitrariness of the sign: Learning advantages from the structure of the vocabulary. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 140, 325–47.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Monaghan, Padraic, Shillcock, Richard C., Christiansen, Morten H. & Kirby, Simon. 2014. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 369, 20130299.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Palmer, Frank. 1971. Grammar. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Google Scholar
Quinn, Paul C. & Eimas, Peter D.. 2000. The emergence of category representations during infancy: Are separate perceptual and conceptual processes required? Journal of Cognition and Development 1, 55–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Greenbaum, Sidney, Leech, Geoffrey & Svartvik, Jan. 1985. A comprehensive grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Reilly, Jamie, Westbury, Chris, Kean, Jacob & Peelle, Jonathan E.. 2012. Arbitrary symbolism in natural language revisited: When word forms carry meaning. PLoS ONE 7, e42286.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ringe, Don. 2006. From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Ross, John R. 1972. The category squish: Endstation Hauptwort. Papers from the regional meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society 8, 316–28.Google Scholar
Ross, John R. 1995. Defective noun phrases. Papers from the regional meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society 31, 398–440.Google Scholar
Schuchardt, Hugo. 1885. Über die Lautgesetze: Gegen die Junggrammatiker. Berlin: R. Oppenheim.Google Scholar
Searle, John R. 1969. Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sereno, Joan. A. 1994. Phonosyntactics. In Hinton, Leanne, Nichols, Johanna & Ohala, John J. (eds.), Sound symbolism, 267–75. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Sereno, Joan A. & Jongman, Allard. 1990. Phonological and form class relations in the lexicon. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 19, 387–404.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sheskin, David J. 2007. Handbook of parametric and nonparametric statistical procedures, 4th edn. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.Google Scholar
Shi, Rushen, Morgan, James L. & Allopenna, Paul. 1998. Phonological and acoustic bases for earliest grammatical category assignment: A cross-linguistic perspective. Journal of Child Language 25, 169–201.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Smith, Mark. 2010. Pragmatic functions and lexical categories. Linguistics 48, 717–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spelke, Elizabeth. 2003. Core knowledge. In Kanwisher, Nancy & Duncan, John (eds.), Functional neuroimaging of visual cognition, 29–56. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Sperber, Dan & Wilson, Deirdre. 1986. Relevance. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Stowell, Timothy. 1981. Origins of phrase structure. Unpublished PhD thesis, MIT.Google Scholar
Taylor, John R. 2002. Cognitive grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Thompson, Sandra A. 1988. A discourse approach to the cross-linguistic category ‘adjective’. In Hawkins, John A. (ed.), Explaining language universals, 167–85. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Wierzbicka, Anna. 1986. What's in a noun? (or: How do nouns differ in meaning from adjectives?). Studies in Language 10, 353–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Winters, James, Kirby, Simon & Smith, Kenny. 2015. Language and Cognition 7, 415–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zipf, George Kingsley. 1935. The psycho-biology of language. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar