Adjectives as saturators vs. modifiers: statistical evidence

McNally, Louise, 1965-; Boleda, Gemma; Evert, Stefan; Gehrke, Berit

Adjectives as saturators vs. modifiers: statistical evidence

Citation

Boleda G, Evert S, Gehrke B, McNally L. Adjectives as saturators vs. modifiers: statistical evidence. In: Aloni M, Kimmelman V, Roelofsen F, Sassoon G, Schulz K, Westera M, editors. Logic, Language and Meaning. 18th Amsterdam Colloquium; 2011 Dec 19-21; Amsterdam. Berlin: Springer; 2012. p. 112-21. (LNCS, no. 7218).

Abstract

This paper reports on a large-scale, statistical analysis of corpus data to support the null hypothesis that ethnic adjectives (EAs, e.g. French) are ordinary adjectives, rather than argument-saturating \nouns in disguise" (in, e.g., French agreement). In particular, EAs are argued to simply modify the noun they combine with; their special properties in inducing argument-like behavior arises from the interaction between the semantics of event nominals and that of the adjective.