Premodifier order in English nominal phrases: A semantic account

The article starts from the description of premodification in English nominal phrases as structured in four zones, given in Quirk and colleagues (A Comprehensive Grammar of Contemporary English, Longman, 1985). The argument is that one explanation for the zones and the zone order is in premodifiers’ types of meaning (“semantic structure”), following the analysis of meaning types in Cruse (Meaning in Language: An Introduction to Semantics and Pragmatics, Oxford University Press, 2004). Semantic structure is distinguished from content; different senses of words can have the same core content but different semantic structures, and accordingly occur in different zones. It is assumed that syntax and other levels of language contribute to the full understanding of premodifier order, complementing this semantic explanation.
The introduction outlines the zone structure, and the semantic analysis to be used. Section 2 discusses the zone immediately before the head, arguing that words there have non-descriptive meaning (denoting entities); for example, percussion in “your actual tinny round percussion instrument”. Section 3 argues that words in the next zone have a concrete descriptive meaning; for example, round in the phrase just cited. Section 4 argues that words in the next zone have abstract, scalar descriptive meaning, or emotive meaning; for example, tinny. Section 5 argues that words in the first zone have purely grammatical meaning; for example, actual.

from Cognitive Linguistics

Advertisement