The use of gradable adjectives and adverbs represents an important means of expressing comparison in English. The grammatical forms of comparatives and superlatives are used to express explicit orderings between objects with respect to the degree to which they possess some gradable property. While comparatives are commonly used to compare two entities (e.g., “The blue whale is larger than an African elephant”), superlatives such as “The blue whale is the largest mammal” are used to express a comparison between a target entity (here, the blue whale) and its comparison set (the set of mammals), with the target ranked higher or lower on a scale of comparison than members of the comparison set. Superlatives thus highlight the uniqueness of the target with respect to its comparison set. Although superlatives are frequently found in natural language, with the exception of recent work by (Bos and Nissim, 2006) and (Jindal and Liu, 2006b), they have not yet been investigated within a computational framework. And within the framework of theoretical linguistics, studies of superlatives have mainly focused on semantic properties that may only rarely occur in natural language (Szabolsci (1986), Heim (1999)). My PhD research aims to pave the way for a comprehensive computational treatment of superlatives. The initial question I am addressing is that of automatically extracting useful information about the target entity, its comparison set and their relationship from superlative constructions. One of the central claims of the thesis is that no unified computational treatment of superlatives is possible because of their great semantic complexity and the variety of syntactic structures in which they occur. I propose a classification of superlative surface forms, and initially focus on so-called “ISA superlatives”, which make explicit the IS-A relation that holds between target and comparison set. They are suitable for a computational approach because both their target and comparison set are usually explicitly realised in the text. I also aim to show that the findings of this thesis are of potential benefit for NLP applications such as Question Answering, Natural Language Generation, Ontology Learning, and Sentiment Analysis/Opinion Mining. In particular, I investigate the use of the “Superlative Relation Extractor“ implemented in this project in the area of Sentiment Analysis/Opinion Mining, and claim that a superlative analysis of the sort presented in this thesis, when applied to product evaluations and recommendations, can provide just the kind of information that Opinion Mining aims to identify.

The grammar of modification is highly complex and raises numerous questions about the relation between meaning and form. This dissertation provides a study of how modified noun phrases are interpreted and examines the consequences of these results for the syntax of the nominal domain. The discussion centers on two types of modification: superlatives and stacked modification. The data comes primarily from English, but other languages are also discussed. There is initial evidence that the main claims hold across a wide range of languages. The common view on superlatives is that they have two types of interpretations which are the result of a scope ambiguity and that the contrast between them needs to be captured by means of syntactic devices. Contra this standard approach I propose a saliency theory of superlatives which claims that there is no categorical difference between these two interpretations and where the variation in the meaning of superlatives is purely pragmatic in nature. Under this view the meaning of superlatives is a function of the properties of the surrounding discourse and the context-sensitivity of superlatives is subsumed to the more general phenomenon of context-dependency in the interpretation of natural language quantifiers. The saliency theory differs from other analyses that have adopted a discourse approach in that the so-called comparative reading does not depend on the presence or interpretation of focus. Previous approaches to multiple adjectives analyzed their order in terms of the semantics of individual adjectives. I present a new set of data which shows that this is insufficient and propose an explanation that takes into account the meaning of the whole nominal phrase. This result has consequences for how the architecture of grammar should be conceived. In particular, it shows that principles of syntactic well-formedness can sometimes be sensitive to compositional semantic interpretation, as well as pragmatic information. This is in contradiction to many contemporary approaches to grammar where the semantic component has no influence on the syntactic one. / text

Submitted by Rafael de Almeida Arruda Felix null (rafael.felixx@hotmail.com) on 2016-09-08T01:58:56Z No. of bitstreams: 1 VERSÃO FINAL DISSERTAÇÃO DE MESTRADO pdf .pdf: 1211716 bytes, checksum: 271bac97474feb56cae7e4959a155aae (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Juliano Benedito Ferreira (julianoferreira@reitoria.unesp.br) on 2016-09-09T20:33:01Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 felix_raa_me_arafcl.pdf: 1211716 bytes, checksum: 271bac97474feb56cae7e4959a155aae (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-09-09T20:33:01Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 felix_raa_me_arafcl.pdf: 1211716 bytes, checksum: 271bac97474feb56cae7e4959a155aae (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-05-31 / Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq) / Partindo da observação de que o uso do superlativo no português do Brasil, principalmente em formas com o sufixo -érrimo e -ésimo, poderia estar associado à fala de homens gays, esta pesquisa de mestrado propõe analisar a fala de homens gays através de entrevistas sociolinguísticas, a fim de verificar se o uso de superlativo poderia configurar uma característica real e/ou indiciária de um falar gay. Com vistas a alcançar esse objetivo, analisamos dados coletados de amostras de fala de 24 informantes do sexo masculino, que se auto-identificam como gays, oriundos da cidade de Ribeirão Preto. Para aferir a frequência de uso do superlativo bem como os fatores linguísticos e extralinguísticos que poderiam estar condicionando esse uso, utilizamos o pacote GOLDVARB X. Os resultados obtidos foram confrontados com dados do que chamamos "grupo controle", extraídos do Banco de Dados Iboruna. Os nossos resultados nos permitiram verificar que o uso dos sufixos superlativos feito por gays não se dá com tanta frequência como sugere o estereótipo. No entanto, quando comparamos os usos do superlativos pelos informantes gays com aqueles do grupo controle, podemos notar uma diferença sutil no uso desses superlativos o que nos permite afirmar que essa possa sim ser uma característica da fala de gays. Nossos resultados também permitem uma reflexão relativa a esse uso envolvendo questões de estereótipo sociolinguístico e identidade, na qual podemos verificar que fala dos informantes gays entrevistados, em sua maioria, é determinada pela identidade e que os informantes a adequam de acordo com a situação de fala, buscando se afastar ou se aproximar do estilo de fala gay. / Based on the observation that the usage of the superlative in the Brazilian Portuguese , mainly the ones formed by the sufixes –érrimo(a) and –ésimo(a), could be associated to the speech of gay men, this research this research proposes to analyze the speech of gay informants through sociolinguistic interviews in order to verify if the usage of superlatives could be said to constitute in a real and/or indexing characteristic of a gay way to speak. In order to achieve our goal, we analyzed data collected from speech samples of 24 male informants self-identified as gay from the city of Ribeirão Preto – SP. Aiming to verify the frequency of usage of the superlative as well as the linguistic and extralinguistic factors that could be conditioned to this usage, we used the GOLDVARB X package. The results that we obtained were then confronted with the data from what we called ―control group‖, extracted from Iboruna database. Our results allowed us to verify that the frequency of usage of the superlative sufixes by gay men was not as high as suggested by the stereotype. However, when we compare the usage of the superlatives by gay men to the usage of the ones by the control group, we can notice a slight difference of usage that allows us to state that this may really be a characteristic of the speech of gay men. Our results also enable a debate on this usage involving matters of sociolinguistic stereotype and identity, by which we can verify that the speech of most of the gay men interviewed for this research is determined by identity and that the informants are able to adjust it depending on the situation of speech, seeking to move closer to or keep away from the gay speaking style.

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