Lexical Semantics of Adjectives - CiteSeerX

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difficulty of combining two linguistic descriptions to form a coordinated single description of the
union of the phenomena covered by each individual description is well known and stems from differences
in the premises, formats and purpose. The microtheory approach rectifies this situation
through the following procedure. First, we collect scholarship pertaining to the scope of a microtheory.
Next, for each contribution, we establish its premises and purpose. If they are different from
the premises and purpose of our general approach, we determine what remains of the description
after these premises are replaced by ours. The remaining material is then reformulated in the metalanguage
of our approach and incorporated into the overall statement of the microtheory. Next,
we check whether the imported descriptions cumulatively cover the intended scope of the microtheory.
If not, original research is undertaken to complete the microtheory.
The relation between our work and linguistic theory, on the one hand, and computational linguistics,
on the other, should be seen, we believe, as being based on the concept of a ‘theory of practice’
(albeit not à la Bourdieu 1977), or, more specifically, of a theory for applying the findings of theoretical
and descriptive linguistics to natural language processing (see Nirenburg and Raskin
1987a,b; Raskin 1987a,b). The microtheory-based methodology for accomplishing this, as described
above, avoids the double pitfall of trying to transfer the findings of linguistics directly into
NLP without accounting for the difference in premises and goals or, alternatively, ignoring those
findings and engaging instead in wasteful reresearching and second-guessing linguistic issues and
redescribing language material in an uninformed and frequently ad hoc fashion.
The structure of this paper reflects the microtheory development process described above. The paper
focuses on the lexicon part of the microtheory. Section 1 surveys the field of adjectival semantics
and identifies the major premises and descriptive results of the individual contributions.
Section 2 briefly presents the premises and basic concepts of our model, the Mikrokosmos approach,
and shows how the useful findings from the survey are incorporated into the microtheory
of adjectival meaning. The issues thus imported and revised include:
• the basic function of the adjective,
• adjective taxonomy,
• the correlation between adjectival syntax and semantics,
• the nature of relative (denominal) adjectives,
• the order of adjectives in multi-adjective strings,
• the use of adjectives as nouns and vice versa,
• the nature of gradability scales for adjectives and degrees of comparison.
Section 3 reviews the MikroKosmos typology of adjectives and their representations. Section 4
continues from a subsection of Section 2 in the direction of the methodology, or--more accurately-
-the theory of the implementation of the semantic representation and lexicographic description of
the adjective, again a theory of practice, as it were. It deals with the issues of:
• reducing the multiple dictionary meanings of an entry to a handful,
• the grain size of meaning presentation and the concept of variable-depth semantics,
• capturing the meaning of an adjective, i.e., the heuristics of semantic determination
• establishing the way to represent the captured meaning ontologically and lexically, i.e., the
heuristics of computational lexicography.