Reinforcing adjectives: A cognitive semantic perspective on grammaticalisation

Paradis, Carita

doi:10.1515/9783110814699.233

Cited by 56 publications

(60 citation statements)

References 23 publications

(25 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…There is ample evidence in support of this claim based on introspective and experimental data concerning the general combinatorial constraints and collocational possibilities between totality modifiers and the lexical elements they modify on the one hand and scalar modifiers and the elements they modify on the other in terms of boundedness (Paradis, 1997(Paradis, , 2001(Paradis, , 2003b. There is also ample evidence concerning actual combinatorial and collocational possibilities based on corpus investigations (Paradis, 1997(Paradis, , 2000a(Paradis, , 2000b(Paradis, , 2003b, both written data (from the BNC -the British National Corpus) and spoken data (from the LLC -the London-Lund Corpus -as well as the spoken part of the BNC).…”

Section: Antonymy and Gradabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A great deal of flexibility is built into our modelling of meaning in that configurational concepts such as BOUNDEDNESS and SCALE are considered to be free structures that are mapped on to different content domains. The advantage in the context of antonymic meanings is that we are able to treat both conventionalized couplings between configuration and content, such as very long in the same way as we treat ad hoc readings, such as very Swedish (for discussions of these matters as well as of meaning change within our model see Paradis, 2000aParadis, , 2000bParadis, , 2003aParadis, , 2003bParadis, , 2005b.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Antonymy and negation—The boundedness hypothesis

Paradis

Willners

2006

Journal of Pragmatics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper investigates the interpretation of unbounded (scalar) adjective antonyms with and without negation such as (not) narrow -(not) wide and bounded adjective antonyms with and without negation such as (not) dead -(not) alive as well as their interpretations with approximating degree modifiers, fairly and almost, respectively. The investigation was designed to test the boundedness hypothesis, namely that the negator is sensitive to the configuration of the adjective in terms of BOUNDEDNESS. The data are Swedish and the results of the experiments show that negated unbounded adjectives do not evoke the interpretation of their antonyms, i.e. not wide does not equal 'narrow'. The results of the experiments with bounded adjectives with and without negation showed that some of the negated adjectives were interpreted as synonyms of their antonyms, i.e. not alive equals 'dead'. However, this pattern was not consistent across the bounded adjectives, since a number of them readily lent themselves to partial readings. Four types of bounded antonyms emerged from the participants' judgements. For both unbounded and bounded adjectives, the interpretations of the approximating degree modifiers and the adjectives were not significantly different from the negated adjectives. #

show abstract

Section: Antonymy and Gradabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Antonymy and negation—The boundedness hypothesis

Paradis

Willners

2006

Journal of Pragmatics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…From commenting on the match between the referent and the head noun, it acquired the ability to designate itself a quality of the referent. That is, it came to function as a descriptive modifier which ascribes properties to the nominal referent such as truthfulness (5) Most of the descriptive modifier meanings of very tend to be bounded, that is, they describe properties that either do or do not apply, such as 'true', 'legally valid' and 'genuine' (Bolinger 1967;Paradis 2000Paradis , 2001. However, we also find examples which impose a marked unbounded construal on a sense such as 'genuine', as in (10).…”

Section: Very As Descriptive Modifiermentioning

confidence: 99%

The history ofvery: the directionality of functional shift and (inter)subjectification

Breban¹,

Davidse²

2016

English Language and Linguistics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

On the basis of extensive corpus analysis, we reconstruct the history of very and the paths of change along which it acquired new meanings. We propose an analytical model that, firstly, assigns general semantic functions to the (sub)modifier relations in the English noun phrase and, secondly, identifies subsenses of these functions on the basis of collocational, semantic and pragmatic distinctions observed in different contexts.

show abstract

“…The purpose of this article is to synthesize my own empirical and theoretical work on gradable meanings over the past decade (Paradis 1997(Paradis , 2000a(Paradis , 2000b(Paradis , 2001(Paradis , 2003aParadis & Willners 2006a, 2006b) with my more recent theoretical development of a general model of lexical meaning (Paradis 2003b(Paradis , 2004(Paradis , 2005, broadly within the framework of Cognitive Semantics (Langacker 1987a;Croft & Cruse 2004). The results of my empirical research using both corpus and experimental methods are explainable through the model of Lexical Meaning as Ontologies and Construals (Paradis 2005), henceforth LOC.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Configurations, construals and change: expressions of DEGREE

Paradis¹

2008

English Language and Linguistics

111

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article challenges the widespread view that DEGREE is a grammatical phenomenon characteristic of certain types of word classes and, instead, argues that DEGREE is pervasive in language and may be associated with most meanings. The main aim of the article is to discuss the results of a number of corpus investigations and experiments of DEGREE meanings in general and of the modification of DEGREE in particular, and to accommodate these results in a general and dynamic model of Lexical Meaning as Ontologies and Construals (LOC; Paradis 2005). The claims are that (i) DEGREE is a BOUNDEDNESS configuration in conceptual space; (ii) DEGREE modifiers operate on the DEGREE structure of the meanings to which they apply through a construal of contextually motivated zone activation within conventionalized senses; (iii) nonconventionalized DEGREE readings of form-meaning pairings are invoked through implication by means of construals of metonymization between senses; and (iv) this process of metonymization is the mechanism through which change may or may not take place.

show abstract

Reinforcing adjectives: A cognitive semantic perspective on grammaticalisation

Cited by 56 publications

References 23 publications

Antonymy and negation—The boundedness hypothesis

Antonymy and negation—The boundedness hypothesis

The history ofvery: the directionality of functional shift and (inter)subjectification

Configurations, construals and change: expressions of DEGREE

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About