As you may know, our Text Engine can put conjunctions (such as “and” and “or”) inbetween the last two elements of lists of nouns. Little is it known that this can be done for adjectives, too.
Why would you need this?
You can create more beautiful and more natural adjective lists next to your nouns.
An example:
With the attributes for a material
[“beautiful”, “light”, “stretchable”]
you can automatically create a nicely flowing sentence like the following:
This beautiful, light and stretchable fabric is made of 100% wool.
Preliminaries
For using this functionality, you need
- A list of one or more adjectives
- A noun those adjectives should inflect for
How does it work?
Something you need to know about adjectives
Adjectives always belong to a subject, usually a noun, and are usually placed directly next to it. Depending on the language, there can be more than one possible placement of an adjective in the sentence.
In English, the adjectives are always in front of its noun:
Mary has a beautiful car.
Roman languages, like Spanish, French or Italian, and some others have two valid positions to put the adjectives. One of these positions is what we call the Primary Position, the other one is the Secondary Position.
With Spanish as an example language, adjectives in the Primary Positions look like this:
La casa verde y grande es la que me gusta.
And in the Secondary Position like this:
La fabulosa y estupenda casa de mi amiga está en Madrid.
Even adjectives in both positions at the same time are possible:
La fabulosa, estupenda y maravillosa casa verde, grande y luminosa.
The Primary Position is the place where the adjectives usually are put. The Secondary Position are exceptions from that rule. Which adjective gets put where is dependent on the specific word and you can actually configure that in your lexicon entry for that adjective.
In the Primary Position as well as the Secondary Position, there not only can be one adjective - both positions allow for lists of adjectives. The most complex case for this looks like this:
AdjSecondary1 AdjSecondary2 AdjSecondary3 Noun AdjPrimary1 AdjPrimary2 AdjPrimary3
Between all of these adjectives, there can now be conjuctions - words like and, or, commas or even nothing. In the above notation:
AdjSecondary1 ConjunctionSecondary1 AdjSecondary2 ConjunctionSecondary2 AdjSecondary3 Noun AdjPrimary1 ConjunctionPrimary1 AdjPrimary2 ConjunctionPrimary2 AdjPrimary3
Configure those conjunctions
As explained above, there are four positions for adjective conjuctions that are possible, ConjunctionSecondary1, ConjunctionSecondary2, ConjunctionPrimary1 and ConjunctionPrimary2. This means we need to configure which conjunction we want for four places.
This is done in the Container Menu, under the tab CONTENT:
- click on a Container in the WRITE section
- activate the adjective by setting Use Phrase Adjective to yes
- Find the text field Adjective Conjunction right next to the Use Phrase Adjective dropdown
Your container menu should look like this:
As the conjunctions can be any kind of text, we decided to go with a written parameter that looks like this:
ConjunctionPrimary1_ConjunctionPrimary2_ConjunctionSecondary1_ConjunctionSecondary2
Note that you always configure the Primary Position with the first two parts of the parameter, no matter where the actual Primary Position is in the actual sentence. This may be a bit confusing at first.
You have to actually write out any conjunction you want to set.
You can use words or some special words in the parameter that produce certain symbols in the text:
- word prints the word
- MODIFIER prints nothing, but is a valid conjuction
- COMMA will put a , at the position
- SEMICOLON will put a ; at the position
- DOT will put a . at the position
For the above Spanish example
La fabulosa , estupenda y maravillosa casa verde , grande y luminosa.
you must set the parameter to
COMMA_y_COMMA_y
