Lexical Semantics of Adjectives - CiteSeerX

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Marx’s (1983) term ‘plasticity’ seems to be more appropriate to designate Lahav’s ‘non-compositionality,’
that is, the fact that the meaning of an adjective shifts with the meaning of the noun it
modifies, depending on what property of that noun the adjective pertains to. An adjective meaning
is non-compositional in our sense if it deviates from the usual adjectival meaning function of highlighting
a property of the noun the adjective modifies and--in a typical case--assigning a value to
it. Non-compositional adjectives, besides the evaluative ones, are also temporal adjectives (see
(40) above) and those of Vendler’s classes A 5 -A 8 of adjectives that “ascribe the adjective... to a
whole sentence,” and a few others.
In summary, we discovered that developing adjective semantics for an application modifies many
popular views on the subject. It becomes clear, for instance, that:
• many adjectives do not modify semantically the nouns that they modify syntactically;
• adjectival (attributive) meanings may be delivered by other parts of speech, and thus the semantics
of adjectives only partially reflects their possible syntactic distinctions;
• more generally, the syntactic behavior of an adjective does not determine its lexical meaning,
even as it may, in some cases, modify the processing of this meaning by the analyzer;
• the major distinction among adjectives is scalar vs. denominal vs. deverbal;
• the attributive/predicative distinction, dominating the current scholarship on the adjective,
has virtually no semantic significance, thus essentially crushing any hope to derive meaning
from deep syntactic analysis;
• there is a significant gap in our knowledge about relations between truly relative adjectives
(as well as nominal modifiers in English) and the nouns they modify;
• the typology of scales for scalars, i.e., those adjectives whose meanings cannot be reduced to
the more ontologically acceptable verb and noun meanings, emerges as a major issue in
adjective semantics and lexicography;
• it is efficient and more reliable to establish semantic distinctions among adjectives in terms
of semantic features rather than as reflections of various syntactic distinctions, which are
popular in the literature.
3. Description of Adjective Meaning in English
3.1 Classes and Subclasses of Adjectives
Our assumption is that the lexicon is the locus of the microtheory of adjectival meaning in Mikro-
Kosmos. Our earlier work on verbs and nouns --see, for instance, Carlson and Nirenburg (1990),
Meyer et al. (1990), and Nirenburg and Defrise (1991) have yielded de facto, implicit microtheories
which allowed for the mass acquisition of entries for these lexical categories. Since little had
been done on adjectives, they were a clear choice for an explicit microtheory.
The effort on building a microtheory of adjectives started with corpus analysis. The initial corpus
of English adjectives was obtained by intersecting all the adjectives in the Longman’s Dictionary
of Contemporary English (LDOCE) with the full texts of The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) for
1987-89. The resulting list was manually divided into scalars and non-scalars. The adjectives were
then cross-divided into gradables and non-gradables, with the former being qualitative adjectives
with full comparison possibilities and the latter being those ambiguous relative/qualitative adjectives
that were discussed in Sections 1.6 and 2.3. The non-scalars were divided into three subclasses:
proper names, event-related adjectives, whose entries were to be derived from the