Lexical Semantics of Adjectives - CiteSeerX

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lar, pseudo-qualitative senses of the seemingly perfectly relative adjectives. Their one telling difference
from the truly qualitative, predicating, scalar adjectives is that the relative adjectives
cannot make the qualitative shift in the attributive position.
(50) Pertaining to [noun meaning] ---> Characteristic of [noun meaning]
The difficulty of finding a relative adjective which would be absolutely resistant to a predicative
shift of meaning is similar to the difficulties Katz (1964: 753) had, looking for a noun which could
never be used with good.
3.2 Elements of (Practical) Methodology
Our lexicographic effort concentrated on the most numerous class of English adjectives, gradable
adjectives. This is a computational-linguistic perspective, which is the opposite of the typical theoretical-linguistic
approach to any problem, which calls for the lion’s share of attention to be devoted
to exceptional, borderline cases (see Introduction above). Theoretical linguists tacitly
assume that the general cases are self-evident and do not require any special work. A good example
of that is the attention to the mixed, relative/qualitative class of adjectives (see Sections 1.4-6
above), while the general rules concerning either the true qualitative adjectives or, especially, true
relative adjectives have never been formulated explicitly enough to be of much use for lexicographic
description. The focus of our approach is the representation of large numbers of “ordinary”
cases.
Polysemous or homonymous adjectives were handled one sense, not one word, at a time. Obviously,
it is not really possible to delimit a single sense without a general view of what the other senses
are, but this is part of a more general issue of how we capture lexical meaning. Let us explain our
method on an example. For the notoriously difficult adjective good (see, for instance, Ziff 1960,
Vendler 1963, Katz 1972--see also Section 4), we start with its general, unspecified, and unrestricted
evaluative meaning (45). This gives us several advantages. First, by taking care of good (45),
we facilitate the acquisition of all adjectives whose meanings relate to the same evaluative scale,
such as bad, excellent, terrible, mediocre, etc. Practically, it means the creation of a template,
which is copied for each new adjective. The entries for all the adjectives of this class may differ
only in range values (51) and constraints on the category of nouns which these adjectives modify
(52).
(51) (excellent (excellent-Adj1
(CAT adj)
(SYN-STRUC
(1 ((root $var1)
(cat n)
(mods ((root $var0)))))
(2 ((root $var0)
(cat adj)
(subj ((root $var1)
(cat n))))))
(SEM-STRUC
(LEX-MAP
(attitude (type evaluative)
(attitude-value (value (> 0.9))
(relaxable-to (value (> 0.8))))
(scope ^$var1)
(attributed-to *speaker*))))))