Adjectives in English: Attribution and predication

Bolinger, Dwight

doi:10.1016/0024-3841(67)90018-6

Cited by 459 publications

(273 citation statements)

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“…I will summarize the cross-linguistic variation of adjectives in three different phenomena: the contrast between attribution and predication (Bolinger 1967); the differences in intersectivity readings expressed by the variation between the adjective-noun (AN) and the noun-adjective (NA) position in Romance and Determiner Spreading in Greek (Alexiadou 2001); and the contrast between definiteness and indefiniteness or specificity and nonspecificity (Jacob 2003, Leu 2007, Demonte 2008). I will first outline the entailments of these contrasts and then, in the next section, I will apply these approaches to the Croatian contrast between Long and Short adjectival forms.…”

Section: Adjectival Contrasts: a Cross-linguistic Perspectivementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The distinction between attribution and predication goes back to Bolinger (1967) and his work still remains a classic when it comes to the nature of adjectives. His work is on English, but the observations he makes are valid for the adjectival category overall.…”

Section: Attribution and Predicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Bolinger (1967) notices that there are a number of attributive adjectives that cannot appear in the predicative construction. These adjectives include ethnic adjectives, relational adjectives, adjectives such as former, mere or alleged (also known as privative adjectives, Partee 2010), and ambiguous adjectives such as poor that can have two possible readings ('pitiful' vs. 'without money'), one of which ('pitiful') is never obtained in predicative position (Alexiadou 2001, 233).…”

Section: Attribution and Predicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Bolinger (1967) states that there are much fewer adjectives that are predicative but cannot be attributive. One of his examples is provided in (3).…”

Section: Attribution and Predicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This is because there are two structures among the attributive construction that can provide more precision to the interpretation of the constituent. An example from Bolinger (1967) is presented in (4).…”

Section: Attribution and Predicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Of good thieves and old friends: An analysis of Croatian adjectival forms

Velnić

2015

Vestnik

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Croatian adjectives have two forms in the masculine gender: the Long (L) form and the Short (S) form. The main distributional difference is that the Short adjective can be in predicative position and the Long one cannot, while both can be in attributive position. This difference between attributive and predicative can be related to a variety of other cross-linguistic distributions concerning adjectives (Alexiadou 2001). It has been stated (Aljović 2002, Trenkić 2004) for (Serbo-)Croatian that the two forms mark a distinction in definiteness or specificity with the long one being [+DEF/+SPEC] and the Short one [-DEF/-SPEC]. A survey on 32 adults was conducted in order to obtain more information about the distribution of the two forms in general; to find out whether it is definiteness or specificity that is being marked by the Long form; and to check whether one of the forms (the Long one) can function as a subject of a sentence in the absence of a noun. The results of the statistical analysis show that the predicative/attributive distinction is not as strict as described in the previous literature (Silić and Pranjković 2007); and that the Long form is related to specificity but does not express it. I propose an analysis that builds on cross-linguistic parallelisms described in Alexiadou 2001 and I propose that Croatian Long and Short distributional patterns are caused by the same factors as Noun Raising in Romance and Determiner Spreading in Greek, even though we find that this is not as strict as in those languages. However, it is only with expanding our cross-linguistic analysis to more languages that we can fully understand the nature of what these subtle differences of adjectives mark.

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Section: Adjectival Contrasts: a Cross-linguistic Perspectivementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Attribution and Predicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Attribution and Predicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Bolinger (1967) states that there are much fewer adjectives that are predicative but cannot be attributive. One of his examples is provided in (3).…”

Section: Attribution and Predicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Attribution and Predicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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