| In a fashion similar to the conjunction of multiple adverbials is that of adjectival words or phrases that serve to modify parts of the sentence. |
Adjective accumulation.In the following example the adverbial phrases are adjectival — all modifiers of the same noun. Unlike attributive adjectives, where each one structures on top of the next (see below), their accumulation is in parallel. |
| (1) | In character, in manners, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity. —Longfellow. | ||
| a. | The supreme excellence in character is simplicity. | Adj (Qual) | |
| b. | The supreme excellence in manners is simplicity. | AdjA (Qual) | |
| c. | The supreme excellence in style is simplicity. | AdjA (Qual) | |
| d. | The supreme excellence in all things is simplicity. | AdjA (Qual) | |
| (2) | He had never seen her so radiant, so young. —J. L. Allen. | ||
| a. | He had never seen her so radiant. | Adj (Qual) | |
| b. | He had never seen her so young. | AdjA (Qual) | |
Accumulating attributive adjectives.When adjectives precede the noun their accumulation is quite similar to that of adverbs. Though the following example is admittedly a bit contrived, it provides in one sentence an illustration of some of the many possibilities that might occur. |
| (1) | She sold her an expensive charming large square ancient green hand woven Armenian carpet at auction. | |||
| a. | She sold her an Armenian carpet at auction. | Adj (Origin) | ||
| b. | She sold her a hand woven carpet (of this kind) at auction. | AdjA (Style) | ||
| c. | She sold her a green carpet (of this kind) at auction. | AdjA (Color) | ||
| d. | She sold her an ancient carpet (of this kind) at auction. | AdjA (Age) | ||
| e. | She sold her a square carpet (of this kind) at auction. | AdjA (Shape) | ||
| f. | She sold her a large carpet (of this kind) at auction. | AdjA (Size) | ||
| g. | She sold her a charming carpet (of this kind) at auction. | AdjA (Appeal) | ||
| h. | She sold her an expensive carpet (of this kind) at auction. | AdjA (Value) | ||
| The eight adjectives in (1) are of different ranks — each probably on a different level of classification (Close 1975:159). Yet, which kinds of adjectives are on which rank may well differ by dialect and style. It also seems that two adjectives of the same rank may as easily be joined with or without and. In (2) the first adjective refers to the temporal scope of the terror and the second to the broad scope of the objects of terror. The presence of the connective seems to bring out the complemental nature of the attributes in a qualitative conjunction. The whole extent of the terror seems to be described with the attributes laid out in parallel. |
| (2) | What courage can withstand the ever-during and all-besetting terrors of a woman's tongue? —Irving. | |||
| a. | What courage can withstand the ever-during terrors of a woman’s tongue? | |||
| b. | (Moreover,) what courage can withstand the all-besetting terrors of a woman’s tongue? | qConj (Adj) | ||
| In (3) the adjectives describing one’s disposition are accumulated, one building upon the other, without the help of a conjunction. |
| (3) | A wide-spreading, hopeful disposition is your only true umbrella in the vale of tears. —Aldrich. | |||
| a. | A hopeful disposition is your only true umbrella in the vale of tears. | |||
| b. | A wide-spreading disposition (of this kind) is your only true umbrella in the vale of tears. | AdjA (Qual) | ||
| In order to express the transformation for adjective accumulation we need to establish a ranking on the various features on sentence adjectives. We saw in the first sentence above a ranking of the following features: origin, style, color, age, shape, size, quality, value. Perhaps the orders of all possible adjective features would map to a scalar value on the feature of [nRank]. Possibly such adjectives that describe measures, for example, such as capacity, weight, volume, length, width, etc., might all be on the same rank with size. Like adverb accumulation the semantics of the full phrase seems to reflect a building up of one modification upon the rest, not simply conjunctive. Unlike adverb accumulation the hierarchy imposed by rank though grammatical is not as strong. The difficulty in the analysis seems to be the fact that many adjectives belong to multiple semantic classes. Nevertheless the ordering of certain attributes within the conjunctive relationship seems to be more important than it is in adjective accumulation. The adjective accumulation transformation where the adjective appears in predicate position does not seem to require ranking (n = m). The conjunction would appear to be handled by Conj(Z) as between two adjective phrases in contexts that refer to two logical predicates (Z=PRED). |
Using semantics for ordering adjectives.The kind of subcategorization that accounts for the ordering of adjectivals is illustrated in figure 9. Some semantic subclasses are given in figure 10. The examples of lexical items to the right are for orientation and do not, of course, belong to the rules. The investigator should note that some of the restrictions of adjectives, such as those used with colors, probably belong more properly to morphology. In this particular case hues may even be compounded as in “yellow-green” and “aquamarine.” Also when the intensity is “light,” there does not seem to be an appropriate adjective to describe the saturation or lack of it. |
Measures with adverbs and adjectives.The rule that allows subcategorization of adjectives and adverbs by measure appears with some examples in figure 11. |
| The various subclasses of adverbial nouns of measure are shown in figure 12. Not all of the features included in figure 7 appear here, since many of the adverbial extensions are not measured with nouns. In the last paragraph we mentioned the various semantic structures associated with color terms. The physical sciences have adopted many measures for many different kinds of things that should be viewed as semantic features. Notice that English speakers often consider “volume” and “capacity” to be two manifestations of the same thing. Many physical features are not fully represented on the semasiological level imposed by English as a natural language. |
