All 7 Uses of
attribute
in
The Portrait of a Lady
- By what process of logical accretion was this slight "personality," the mere slim shade of an intelligent but presumptuous girl, to find itself endowed with the high attributes of a Subject?†
Chpt Pref. *attributes = characteristics (of something or someone)
- She was usually prepared to explain these—when the explanation was asked as a favour; and in such a case they proved totally different from those that had been attributed to her.
Chpt 3attributed = credited (pointed to as the cause of something)
- His friends at present judged him more cheerful, and attributed it to a theory, over which they shook their heads knowingly, that he would recover his health.†
Chpt 5 *attributed = credited (pointed to a source for something)
- Lord Warburton loomed up before her, largely and brightly, as a collection of attributes and powers which were not to be measured by this simple rule, but which demanded a different sort of appreciation—an appreciation that the girl, with her habit of judging quickly and freely, felt she lacked patience to bestow.†
Chpt 12attributes = characteristics (of something or someone)
- Afterwards, however, she always remembered that one should never regret a generous error and that if Madame Merle had not the merits she attributed to her, so much the worse for Madame Merle.
Chpt 19attributed = credited (pointed to as the cause of something)
- To surround his interior with a sort of invidious sanctity, to tantalise society with a sense of exclusion, to make people believe his house was different from every other, to impart to the face that he presented to the world a cold originality—this was the ingenious effort of the personage to whom Isabel had attributed a superior morality.†
Chpt 39attributed = credited (pointed to a source for something)
- "He's the incarnation of taste," Ralph went on, thinking hard how he could best express Gilbert Osmond's sinister attributes without putting himself in the wrong by seeming to describe him coarsely.†
Chpt 34
Definitions:
-
(1)
(attribute as in: It is an attribute of...) a characteristic (of something or someone)
-
(2)
(attribute as in: I attribute it to...) to credit (a source for something)in two typical senses:
- "I attribute it to her work." -- to say who or what made something happen
- "Remember to attribute any quotations in your paper." -- indicate the source of a quotation or idea