This paper investigates a little-studied class of adjectives that we refer to as ‘complex adjectives’, i.e., operationally, adjectives constituted of at least two word tokens separated by a hyphen. We study the properties of these adjectives using two very large text collections: a portion of Wikipedia and a Web corpus. We consider three corpus-based measures of morphological productivity, and ...

Gradable adjectives are inherently vague and are used by clinicians to document medical interpretations (e.g., severe reaction, mild symptoms). We present a comprehensive study of gradable adjectives used in the clinical domain. We automatically identify gradable adjectives and demonstrate that they have a substantial presence in clinical text. Further, we show that there is a specific pattern ...

The literature on predicates of personal taste (PPTs) has focused on a surprisingly limited range of expressions. This narrow focus has led to problematic theoretical conclusions about the syntax and semantics. I argue that PPTs are an instance of a more interesting general category of (what I call) evaluational predicates. Like other gradable adjectives, PPTs are sensitive to a relevant degree...

Compressed and implicit nominal phrases as syntactic features of academic writing (Biber & Gray, 2010, 2016) are underexplored in L2 research writing. In this study, I cross-examined attributive adjectives, prepositional phrases, noun premodifiers, appositive nouns qualitative quantitative articles (RAs) authored by Filipino writers (FRWs) across Applied Linguistics, Measurement Evaluation,...

This paper reports on a study investigating the relationship between metacognitive strategy awareness in reading and reading ability in L1 and L2. Forty Malaysian secondary school students responded to a reading metacognitive awareness questionnaire. They also completed four sets of reading comprehension tests to determine their reading competence in L1 and L2. Results indicate that reading met...

We compare several different corpusbased and lexicon-based methods for the scalar ordering of adjectives. Among them, we examine for the first time a lowresource approach based on distinctivecollexeme analysis that just requires a small predefined set of adverbial modifiers. While previous work on adjective intensity mostly assumes one single scale for all adjectives, we group adjectives into d...

We examine predicative adjectives as an unsupervised criterion to extract subjective adjectives. We do not only compare this criterion with a weakly supervised extraction method but also with gradable adjectives, i.e. another highly subjective subset of adjectives that can be extracted in an unsupervised fashion. In order to prove the robustness of this extraction method, we will evaluate the e...

This study investigates the depth of lexical knowledge in first language (L1) speakers and second language (L2) learners in reference to hierarchical word knowledge. Eighty-eight participants took part in a lexical decision task that assessed their speed and accuracy in recognizing words and nonwords. Prime and target pairs in the lexical decision task were related words (hyponynm to hypernym a...

This study analyzes lexical proficiency in oral and written texts produced by second language (L2) learners of English. The purpose of the study is to examine relationships between analytic scores of depth of lexical knowledge, breadth of lexical knowledge, and access to core lexical items and holistic scores of lexical proficiency. A corpus of 240 spoken texts and 240 written texts produced by...

Comparison of positive and negative naturally read adjectives to neutral adjectives yielded an overlapping higher BOLD response in the occipital and the orbitofrontal cortex (gyrus rectus). Superior medial frontal gyrus and posterior cingulate gyrus showed higher BOLD response to negative adjectives and inferior frontal gyrus to positive adjectives. The overlap of activated regions and lack of ...