Lexical Semantics of Adjectives - CiteSeerX

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hypothesis of practical effability for KBMT (88) offers a justification for this. What this means, in
plainer terms, is that if we treat the meaning of good unspecified with regard to the noun property
it modifies, there is a solid chance that there will be an adjective with a matching generalized, unspecified
meaning like that in the target language as well.
In fact, however, we go one step further with the lexical entry of good and other adjectives from
the same scale and remove their meaning from the nouns they modify, making them contribute instead
to an evaluative attitude pertaining to the whole sentence. It can be argued, of course, that
since the scope of the attitude remains the modified noun, all that changes is the formalism and not
the essence of the matter. We do not wish to insist, therefore, that this additional step constitutes a
step towards an even larger grain size.
The other, non-attitude-based scalars operate in a standard fashion (92):
(92) Standard Treatment of Scalar Meanings:
Insert the scale name and scale value for an adjective as a property-value pair in the
frame describing the meaning of the noun the adjective modifies.
With a simple noun like house (93), simple in the sense that its meaning--at least the one used in
the example--is directly mapped into an ontological concept, the meanings of big house and red
house will be represented in our TMR as shown in (94i-ii), respectively:
(93) (house
(house-N1
(CAT n)
(SYN-STRUC
(1 ((root $var0)
(cat n))) )
` (SEM-STRUC
(LEX-MAP
(2 (private-home))
(94) (i) (private-home
(size-attribute (value > 0.75))
(ii) (private-home
(color-attribute (value red))
In (94i) the linking attribute is selected rather high in the hierarchy of attributes, because in the ontology
SIZE-ATTRIBUTE is the parent of such properties as LENGTH-ATTRIBUTE, WIDTH-ATTRIBUTE,
AREA-ATTRIBUTE, WEIGHT-ATTRIBUTE, etc. If the context does not allow the analyzer to select one
of those, a coarser-grain solution is preferred. In other words, we represent the meaning of big
house without specifying whether big pertains to the length, width, height or area of a house.
Some adjectives like big and other spatial adjectives (see Section 1.10 and references there, especially
Spang-Hanssen 1990), which are applicable to different dimensions and their various combinations,
allow for more “plasticity” due to this property indeterminacy, and others, such as red,
allow for less, but different interpretations of a finer size are always available, and we deliberately
choose to ignore them.
The advantage of a larger grain size is, of course, the increased feasibility and manageability of
lexical description and analysis, thanks, for instance, to much more limited polysemy. But there is
a price to pay for this position: if a translation depends on the availability of a finer-grain polysemy,
the translation will fail. We are obviously gambling on the infrequency of such situations and on
the applicability of the practical effability principle in many cases.