Lexical Semantics of Adjectives - CiteSeerX

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2.3 The Ontological Approach to Issues in the Syntax and Semantics of Adjectives
Our analysis of adjectives for the MikroKosmos microtheory shows that the taxonomies and the
issues important for adjective meaning representation are quite different from the taxonomies and
issues debated in the literature. One reason may be that the literature on adjectives is uniformly uninformed
by any practical task which would involve the representation and description of adjective
meaning. In the rest of this section, we review the issues discussed in Section 1 in the light of the
needs of our microtheory. We intend to demonstrate that many of the issues which dominate the
literature on adjectives are less significant for adjective meaning determination and representation.
Both adjectives in the examples of the previous section are scalars. The scalar/non-scalar distinction
turns out to be more essential than some other distinctions discussed in Section 1 above. Because
most scalars are used both attributively and predicatively and because, as shown in (38) and
(39), the semantic representation is the same for both usages, this all-important distinction of Section
1 (especially, Section 1.4) plays a minor role in our approach. In other words, differences in
the shape of the SEM-STRUC zones of lexicon entries for adjectives are more important for us than
differences in syntactic subcategorization patterns, as encoded in the SYN-STRUC zone of the entries.
The concepts of time-stability and dynamicity/staticity of the properties expressed by adjectives
and, accordingly, their relations with nominal and verbal entities and meanings (see Section 1.2
above) take a new identity as well. The purely temporal aspect in MikroKosmos is recorded with
the meaning of the entire proposition, and adjective entries are not marked for it. Some temporal
adjectives, of the kind that Levi presents as derived from adverbs rather than nouns (40--her (1.9)
in Levi 1978: 7), are analyzed in a completely different manner because they do not really modify
semantically the nouns they modify syntactically--in other words, the temporal meaning of the adjective
characterizes the proposition. Thus, occasional visitor (40iii) is analyzed as a rhetorical
paraphrase of visit occasionally. In general, it is very important for MikroKosmos that syntactic
dependency by no means predetermines semantic dependency.
(40) (i) former roommate
(ii) early riser
(iii) occasional visitor
(iv) eventual compromise
More interestingly, the issue of the relations between adjectives, on the one hand, and nouns and
verbs, on the other, assumes several dimensions. First, there are obviously, adjectives which derive
their meanings from nouns. Their entries are, then, essentially noun entries adapted for adjectival
use (see Sections 3.3 and 3.4). Similarly, there is a much larger class of event-related adjectives,
and their entries are also essentially verb entries adapted for adjectival use (see Section 3.3). The
denominal nature of some adjectives is very well-known in literature; the deverbal nature of a large
adjective class is not, except perhaps for occasional brief asides on the participles, which constitute
a small portion of this class--provided that one decides to include them in it.
In fact, the most crucial taxonomic distinction within the lexical category of adjectives for our approach
is the ontology-based distinctions among the:
• scalar adjectives, whose meanings are based on property ontological concepts;
• denominal adjectives, whose meanings are based on object ontological concepts; and
• deverbal adjectives, whose meanings are based on process ontological concepts.