This study investigated neural activation patterns during verb processing in children, using fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging). Preschool children (aged 4-6) passively listened to lists of verbs and adjectives while neural activation was measured. Findings indicated that verbs were processed differently than adjectives, as the verbs recruited motor systems in the frontal cortex durin...

The French language, particularly, French for Specific Purpose, uses a lot relational adjectives. These one indicate a certain degree of specialization. In a corpus analysis of 90420 occurrences gathered from dissertations and news paper related to trade field, we tried to constitute a collocation corpus of nouns and adjectives, particularly relational adjectives. A great interest in the proces...

This article examines the role of gradable properties in referring expressions from the perspective of natural language generation. First, we propose a simple semantic analysis of vague descriptions (i.e., referring expressions that contain gradable adjectives) that reflects the contextdependent meaning of the adjectives in them. Second, we show how this type of analysis can inform algorithms f...

This paper details the integration into Port4NooJ of 15 lexicon-grammar tables describing the distributional properties of 4,248 human intransitive adjectives. The properties described in these tables enable the recognition and generation of semantico-syntactically equivalent adjectival constructions where the adjective has a predicative function. These properties also establish semantic relati...

In this paper we report on an ongoing multiinstitution effort to encode inferential patterns associated with adjective modification in English. We focus here on a subset of intensional adjectives typically referred to as “non-subsective” predicates. This class includes adjectives such as alleged, supposed, so-called, and related modally subordinating predicates. We discuss the initial results o...

The meaning of gradable adjectives is highly contextdependent, and is notoriously difficult to capture precisely. Recent work in theoretical linguistics suggests that the way we use gradable adjectives can be explained in terms of optimal language use. To test this hypothesis we formulate a probabilistic speaker model that combines ideas from Bayesian approaches to pragmatic reasoning as social...

Social-psychological research on stereotyping was applied to lesbianism among American college students. The hypothesis that stereotypes of lesbians are often inaccurate predictors of individual lesbians was supported. Using stereotypes of lesbians identified by previous research, lesbians rated themselves on a series of bipolar stereotypical adjectives, and a comparison group of nonlesbians ra...

In contrast to nouns, little is known about the graded structure of adjective categories. In this study we investigate if adjectives categories show a similar graded structure and explain it using a similarity-based account. The results show a reliable graded structure which is adequately explained by two formal models based on prototypes and exemplars, therefore generalizing the model performa...

In the field of visual art, metaphor is a way to communicate meaning to the viewer. We present a computational system for communicating visual metaphor that can identify adjectives for describing an image based on a low-level visual feature representation of the image. We show that the system can use this visual-linguistic association to render source images that convey the meaning of adjective...

The purpose of this fMRI study was to find out whether active processing of the emotional valence of adjectives leads to an activation of different brain regions than passively reading does. Neuronal activation of emotional words has been investigated in different contexts. Words vary from adjectives [4] and nouns [1,2] with positive, negative and neutral valence, adjectives describing personal...