The red dress is cute: why subjective adjectives are more often predicative

Abstract

Which adjectives tend to occur as attributive (the cute/red dress) versus predicative (the dress is cute/red) and why? Building on findings from Wiegand et al. (2013. Predicative adjectives: An unsupervised criterion to extract subjective adjectives. In Lucy Vanderwende, Hal DauméIII & Katrin Kirchhoff (eds.), Proceedings of the 2013 conference of the North American chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics : Human language technologies (NAACL-HLT), 534–539. Atlanta, GA: Association for Computational Linguistics) and Vartiainen (2013. Subjectivity, indefiniteness and semantic change. English Language and Linguistics 17(1). 157–179), this paper argues that subjective adjectives such as cute tend to be placed in predicative position not just because they often describe discourse-new information, but because this position serves to foreground information that the hearer may disagree with. This claim is supported using data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies, Mark. 2008. The corpus of contemporary American English: One billion words, 1990-present. Available at: https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/) combined with human annotations for subjectivity from Scontras et al. (2017. Subjectivity predicts adjective ordering preferences. Open Mind 1(1). 53–66) et seq.; and data from image captions versus descriptions (for seeing versus low-vision people) from the National Gallery of Art. A production experiment manipulates the discourse context to further show that adjectives tend to be placed in predicative position when they express controversial information. Overall, this paper explores how the lexical semantics of adjectives shapes the pragmatic contexts in which they tend to be used, which in turn shapes the syntax of the sentences using them.