Abstract
This paper reports on a large-scale, statistical analysis of corpus data to support the null hypothesis that ethnic adjectives (EAs, e.g. French) are ordinary adjectives, rather than argument-saturating “nouns in disguise” (in, e.g., French agreement). In particular, EAs are argued to simply modify the noun they combine with; their special properties in inducing argument-like behavior arises from the interaction between the semantics of event nominals and that of the adjective.
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Boleda, G., Evert, S., Gehrke, B., McNally, L. (2012). Adjectives as Saturators vs. Modifiers: Statistical Evidence. In: Aloni, M., Kimmelman, V., Roelofsen, F., Sassoon, G.W., Schulz, K., Westera, M. (eds) Logic, Language and Meaning. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7218. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31482-7_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31482-7_12
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