Dealing with Italian Adjectives in Noun Phrase: a study oriented to Natural Language Generation

This paper describes a theoretical and empirical investigation about the position of adjectives in the Italian language. The long term goal which oriented the study is the formalization of this information into a natural language generation system. Providing that adjectives mainly occur within noun phrases, we focused on them and we collected data from corpora representing very different text genres, i.e. social media and standard ones, in order to compare the theoretical predictions with the real use of the adjective in Italian. The results obtained by confirm the previsions of the modern linguistic theories but also show the different behaviour of adjectives in the distinct analysed genres.