Overview. This paper provides an account for patterns of conjunction of the adjectives of quantity (Q-adjectives) many and few with ordinary gradable adjectives, as in (1), and explores its consequences for the semantics of Q-adjectives and the elements they combine with. (1) a. Prof. Smith's many and important contributions to imaging science… b. The trees in the grove were many and tall c. Th...

This research investigates the measurement of perceptions by means of adjectives freely reported by respondents in semi-open questions. It involved the use of semi-open responses of 1′763 Swiss individuals to develop indicators for a latent variable representing the perception of comfort of public transportation. The indicators are then incorporated into a discrete choice model of revealed mode...

For fine-grained sentiment analysis, we need to go beyond zero-one polarity and find a way to compare adjectives that share a common semantic property. In this paper, we present a semi-supervised approach to assign intensity levels to adjectives, viz. high, medium and low, where adjectives are compared when they belong to the same semantic category. For example, in the semantic category of EXPE...

This paper describes our system participating in task 18 of SemEval-2010, i.e. disambiguating SentimentAmbiguous Adjectives (SAAs). To disambiguating SAAs, we compare the machine learning-based and lexiconbased methods in our submissions: 1) Maximum entropy is used to train classifiers based on the annotated Chinese data from the NTCIR opinion analysis tasks, and the clause-level and sentence-l...

This paper presents a comprehensive, corpus-based study of adjectival concepts. An adjectival concept is a semantic class of adjectives, for example, “adjectives which express feeling”. We represent adjectival concepts by abstract nouns (such as “feeling”), and extract instances where abstract nouns are modified by adjectives (such as “happy feeling”) from a large corpus of Japanese newspaper a...

Focusing on the examples of multiple degree modification, this paper argues that the class of degree expressions in English is syntactically and semantically diverse, subdivided both according to the semantic effects of its members and according to the extent to which they permit, and participate in, multiple layers of modification. We argue that these two factors are linked, and result in (at ...

Scalar adjectives lacking closed upper boundaries (like far) can be coerced to have a closed upper boundary reading when combined with degree modification with too, e.g. too far to walk. Parallel to the mapping of event structure to scalar structure in adjectives [4], we observe that scalar adjectives are end-marked in ASL. These adjectives receive marking similar to telic verbs, indicating tha...

Three studies investigated how 24-month-olds and adults resolve temporary ambiguity in fluent speech when encountering prenominal adjectives potentially interpretable as nouns. Children were tested in a looking-while-listening procedure to monitor the time course of speech processing. In Experiment 1, the familiar and unfamiliar adjectives preceding familiar target nouns were accented or deacce...

Current empirical evidence regarding nonconsciously priming emotion concepts is limited to positively versus negatively valenced affect. This article demonstrates that specific, equally valenced emotion concepts can be nonconsciously activated, remain inaccessible to conscious awareness, and still affect behavior in an emotion-specific fashion. In Experiment 1A, participants subliminally primed...

This study investigates whether the head of the Chinese adjective compounds is on the left or right or on both sides. Sproat (1998), Starosta et al (1998), and Ceccagno, et al (2006, 2007) argue that the adjectives are right-headed, and Huang (1998) claims that Chinese adjectives are headless. Using the ABB type of adjectives as evidence, I argued that the head of the Chinese adjectives is more...