Lexical Semantics of Adjectives - CiteSeerX

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does accept as a dogma what Levi so painstakingly proves, namely that “relative adjectives [are]
derivatives of nouns” (Bally 1944: 207).
It is easy to understand why the French, Russian, and other Continental scholars have paid more
attention to the relative adjectives than their colleagues dealing with English: there are rather few
truly relative adjectives in English, and the term is basically unfamiliar to English grammarians because
much, if not most of what relative adjectives do in other languages is done in English by
nouns preceding other nouns (see also Section 1.9 below). Unlike in the Continental and many other
languages, the English morphology does not provide most adjectives with a specific morphological
profile, distinct from that of the nouns, and that makes this syntactic arrangement possible.
In spite of all of this attention to the relative adjectives outside of the realm of English grammar,
the nature and typology of the relations between their meanings and those of the nouns they are
derived from remain rather unclear. Maurel (1993: 23-24), looking for something more specific
than Mélis-Puchulu’s (1991: 37) defining statement in (23) and attempting to define some more
specific relations, such as (24i) or (24ii), discovers that these leave many other cases uncovered,
and so he settles on (25), which is even less informative than (23). (RA is, of course, ‘relative adjective,’
and N is the noun it is derived from.)
(23) artériel /arterial/: that which is related to artère /artery/
(24) (i) [meaning of] RA = ‘typical of N’
(ii) [meaning of] RA = ‘whose part N is remarkable for its dimensions,
its number’
(25) [meaning of] RA = the adjective corresponding to N
1.6 Relative/Qualitative Adjectives
Even if most of what is known about the relative adjectives is negative properties (nonpredicating,
nongradable, nonnominalizable) a considerable amount of attention has been paid to those adjectives
which can function both as relative and qualitative, thus alternating between the nonpredicating
and predicating syntactic behavior and changing their meaning in the process (see (8ii) in
Section 1.4 above). Quirk et al. (1985: 435-436) characterized this meaning shift as that from the
“inherent” meaning of the ambiguous adjective to the “noninherent” one. A reasonable interpretation
of inherence/noninherence on the basis of their example (see (2v) in Section 1.2 above) is the
shift from a physical property to an extended or metaphorical nonphysical one--at the very least,
this is apparently the largest and most obvious case of this dichotomy (and, not so incidentally, the
main, if only implicit tenet of Lakoff and Johnson 1980).
For the Montegovians (Siegel 1976a, Larson 1995--see examples (16)-(20)), the shift from the
predicating use to the non-predicating use is the shift from the extensional meaning to the intensional
one, and they are aware of a number of adjectives which admit both and thus are extensionally/intensionally
ambiguous, exactly as beautiful is in (16)-(17). Considerations like these made
a Russian scholar question the very distinction between the relative and qualitative adjectives (Trofimov
1972). Taylor (1992: 1) applies the cognitive-grammar Langacker-type (1987) analysis to
the adjective old (cf. Bouillon and Viegas’s 1994 analysis of the French adjective vieux and its relation
to the Spanish viejo and antiguo), which, according to him, has one absolute (intersective,
predicating) and three synthetic (nonintersective. nonpredicating) meanings, as shown in (26i-iv),