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Old English ditransitive adjectives

Paper · 2005 · Alejandro Alcaraz Sintes

Summary

The paper by Alejandro Alcaraz-Sintes (University of Jaén) looks at a small, little-studied group of Old English adjectives. These adjectives behave like three-place predicates. One argument is always the nominative subject. The other two can appear as case-marked noun phrases, prepositional phrases or clauses. Drawing on examples from the DOEC, the author tries to list every such adjective. He sorts them into meaning classes: gratitude, generosity/abundance, forgiveness, obedience, guilt/responsibility, deserving, agreement and similarity. For each class he describes the semantic roles and the ways they are realized syntactically, compares synonyms and related adjectives, and gives a sample entry for a planned dictionary of adjectival complementation.

The central definitional move is to call an adjective ditransitive because its meaning has two complement slots. Both complements do not have to appear in the text. This choice lets attested and unattested patterns be organized in one consistent way. It matters because existing dictionaries (DOE, Bosworth & Toller, OED) record valency only partly and unevenly.

Key points

  • Ditransitive adjectives are treated as trivalent: a nominative subject plus two complements, either of which may be overt or left implicit. For example, a bare "be thankful" still counts as ditransitive.
  • There are few such adjectives, both in Old English and in Present-Day English. All examples come from the DOEC.
  • The proposed lexicon arranges each entry on several levels:
    • syntactic function (attributive, postpositive, predicative),
    • sense,
    • semantic frame,
    • syntactic structure.
  • Each entry also lists synonyms, quasi-synonyms and antonyms, and gives definitions as paraphrases, e.g. cystig as "willing to give and share things."
  • The author partly rejects Comesaña-Rincón's "pseudo-transitive" category. He argues that a dative pronoun after "acceptable" is an EXPERIENCER argument. He also argues that an infinitive after "difficult/easy" is a SCOPE complement of the adjective.
  • The corpus decides whether a role must surface. georn "ready and willing" always takes its THEME, while ofergytol "forgetful" appears with or without one.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Defining valency by the meaning's argument slots rather than by surface counts keeps one frame per sense, even when the text realizes none, one or both complements.
  • I2. Each argument is marked as obligatory or optional per lexeme, based on whether the corpus ever shows the word without it.
  • I3. Material that looks like a complement (an infinitive after "difficult", a dative after "acceptable") is reanalysed as a real role of the adjective (SCOPE, EXPERIENCER).
  • I4. When a pattern is unattested, it is posited by analogy with close semantic relatives, which keeps a whole class uniform.
  • I5. Paraphrase-style definitions are kept separate from lists of translation equivalents.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): Adjective frames such as thankful/guilty/generous could carry implicit slots (to whom, for what) that the frame layer fills from context or leaves as recoverable gaps.
  • I2 (world): The compiled adjective valency lexicon could store an obligatoriness flag per role, so missing obligatory roles trigger a search for an antecedent instead of being ignored.
  • I3 (tree): The parser and UD conversion could attach such infinitives and obliques directly to the adjective head, so that the frame stage can assign these roles reliably.
  • I4 (learn): Self-induced repair rules could propagate a frame observed for one adjective to its semantic class members, then check the result against silver data before accepting it.
  • I5 (back): Generation and the compressor could use paraphrase definitions to rephrase rare adjectives explicitly, with synonyms held in a separate field.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

📚 Shelves 3The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 worksClassics · 67 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 1,373 worksHistorical linguistics & language change · 159 works

Cite

Cite as Alejandro Alcaraz Sintes. 2005. Old English ditransitive adjectives. SELIM 13.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.17811/selim.13.2005.9-46

@inproceedings{sintes2005old,
  title = {{Old English ditransitive adjectives}},
  author = {Alejandro Alcaraz Sintes},
  booktitle = {SELIM 13},
  year = {2005},
  doi = {10.17811/selim.13.2005.9-46},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.17811/selim.13.2005.9-46}
}

References

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