Lexical Semantics of Adjectives - CiteSeerX

1.2 Basic Syntax and Semantics of the Adjective
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One immediate objection to “the conventional view” is that not all adjectives modify nouns. They
do when they are used attributively (1i) but they do not (at least, not syntactically) when used predicatively
(1ii):
(1) (i) This is a good book.
(ii) This book is good.
The dual attributive/predicative use is just one of the five largely syntactic features that Quirk et
al. (1985: 402-403, 434-436) associate with the adjectives (2):
(2) (i) Attributiveness/predicativeness;
(ii) Modifiability by adverbs like very;
(iii) Staticity/Dynamicity, as illustrated by the distinction between
the static The boy is tall and dynamic The boy is being
unreasonable, with the construction N is being ______
serving as diagnostic for dynamicity;
(iv) Gradability/nongradability, as illustrated by the distinction
between good (better, worse) and male, 2 with all the
dynamic adjectives but not the static ones being gradable
(v) Inherence/noninherence, as illustrated by the distinction between
firm handshake and firm friend and diagnosed through the
nominalizability vs. nonnominalizability, respectively, of the
adjective: the firmness of the handshake/*the firmness of
the friend.
Some similar features are distinguished by Shramm (1979: 6) for Russian qualitative (gradable,
scalar) adjectives: degrees of comparison, diminution, augmentation; change of attribute over time;
varying absolute meanings (a wide board is a foot wide; a wide street is 50 foot wide); occurrence
with quantifying adverbs. Shramm’s features are a mixture of “the lexico-grammatical meaning,
the morphological properties, and the syntactic functions” (4).
Quirk and Greenbaum (1973) and Quirk et al. (1985) do not really ever do semantics, but their last
three features (2iii-v) can be seen--and actually are presented by them (Quirk et al. 1985: 434-436)-
-as basically semantic ones, except that they are also based, in one way or another, on a syntactic
property. In languages that do have adjectives the category is not so hard to define in some such
syntactic terms. The difficulty is with a semantic definition, and this is where Lyons’s caution came
from. In languages, where there are no or practically no adjectives, their semantics is divided, usually
quite unevenly, between the nouns and the verbs. Lyons argues carefully that there must be
something inherent to the meaning of the category for it to behave syntactically the way it does:
“...qualitative adjectives fall, semantically, between the most typical nouns and most typical verbs; and in
particular languages they may be assimilated, grammatically, to either nouns or verbs. In Latin, for example,
nouns and adjectives are much more similar from a grammatical point of view than they are in English. In
Chinese, on the other hand, adjectives may be regarded as a subclass of verbs (cf. Kratochvíl, 1968: 113).
The term ‘adjective’, as we have already seen, implies the primacy of syntactic considerations in the
definition of the part-of-speech or expression-class that it denotes; and it is interesting to note that, whereas
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latest genetic findings about the continuity and, therefore, gradability of the gender scale notwithstanding--because,
of course, natural language semantics does not reflect scientific views
of reality--at least, not right away.