Between-Noun Comparisons
نویسنده
چکیده
Adjectives are typically felicitous in within-predicate comparisons—constructions of the form ‘X is more A than y’, as in This is bigger than that, but are often infelicitous in between-predicate comparisons—constructions of the form ‘X is more A than (y is) B’, as in *Tweety is bigger than (it is) heavy. Nouns, by contrast, exhibit the inverse pattern. The challenge is to account for their felicity in between-predicate comparisons, as, for instance, in This bird is more a duck than a goose, while capturing their infelicity in within-predicate comparisons, as in #This bird is more (of) a duck than that one. Postulating either semantic gradability, or even only ad-hoc, metalinguistic gradable interpretations for noun to capture the meaning of between-noun comparisons results in wrong predictions for within-noun comparisons and other gradable constructions (#very duck; too duck). The paper presents a solution to this problem, using the psychological notion of a contrast-set. The solution correctly predicts inference patterns and truth value judgments pertaining to between noun constructions. 1 Comparison constructions with Adjectives and Nouns
منابع مشابه
On the Proper Treatment of Noun-Noun Metaphor: A Critique of the Sapper Model
This paper responds to the claim of Veale, O’Donoghue and Keane (1995) that SME (Falkenhainer, Forbus & Gentner, 1989; Forbus, Ferguson & Gentner, 1994) performs poorly on noun-noun comparisons, such as A surgeon is like a butcher. Veale et al. argue that such noun-noun comparisons involve “object-centered representations” that do not contain higher-order relations, and that Sapper’s chaining o...
متن کاملInvestigating Embedded Question Reuse in Question Answering
The investigation presented in this paper is a novel method in question answering (QA) that enables a QA system to gain performance through reuse of information in the answer to one question to answer another related question. Our analysis shows that a pair of question in a general open domain QA can have embedding relation through their mentions of noun phrase expressions. We present methods f...
متن کاملAn Applied Linguistics Look at the Linguistic Comparison of Nominal Group Complexity between Two Samples of a Genre
The roles and effects of changes in syntax on comprehension and processing effort, and the relationships between these two, comprise a large and separate field of inquiry, with the general belief now in place that such changes and variations bring about varied psycholinguistic and discursive implications for comprehension, manifesting themselves differently in different genres.The current study...
متن کاملNP-internal agreement and the structure of the noun phrase
For the analysis of the noun phrase, the treatment which currently prevails in generative grammar is the one in which the head of the noun phrase is identified with the determiner, rather than with the noun. This D(et)P treatment has the advantage of providing a uniform account of all syntactic categories, both the substantive and the functional ones, and it provides a natural way to capture th...
متن کاملPre-Noun Modifiers as a Means to Describe Product Characteristics
The article deals with the characteristics of noun phrases functioning in pre-position. Pre-noun modifiers, or attributive modifiers, are among the high-capacity structures in the contemporary English language, as they enable to devoid of prepositions and to describe objects in a laconic way. The goal of this research was to analyze the way scholars interpret this linguistic structure today, as...
متن کامل