Lexical Semantics of Adjectives - CiteSeerX

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With adjectives, however, we will not find the corresponding concept in the ontology unless the
adjective pertains to a noun or a verb and the LEX-MAP of the adjective is to be derived from that
of the corresponding noun or verb. In this case, the adjectival meaning can be determined only after
the meaning of the noun or verb is specified.
Before pursuing the particular path of the determination of the adjectival meaning, let us pause to
consider what resources we can use in the determination of meaning in general. The dictionary entries
and/or the speaker’s intuition give us the general idea. The contexts in which the word occurs
allows us to remove the word, replace it with an antonym, synonym, or other cognate word and see
what happens to the meaning of the sentence. Obviously, if the entry being acquired is synonymous
to a previously acquired entry, the problem is solved even though there are no identical synonyms
in languages, and the distinctions between two synonyms, represented by their diagnostic constructions,
i.e., contexts in which one of them fits and the other does not (see, for instance, Raskin and
Weiser 1987: 115), should be carefully checked out; we may, in fact, have identical synonyms in
the selected grain-size: in that case the set of diagnostic constructions will be conveniently empty.
Let us focus, however, on the most difficult and interesting case, when we do not get any easy escapes.
If we find no previously acquired close meaning cognates and we cannot quite figure out
how to bend a dictionary entry into our framework, we should focus on the contexts in which the
word occurs. Bloomfield’s unfriendly advice would be to look for the features brought by the word
into each situation in which it is uttered, focusing on the distinctive features (see Bloomfield 1935:
139; cf. Alston 1964: 26-28). Now, Bloomfield introduced this definition only to declare meaning
unknowable. Alston is not too hopeful about this approach either.
If, while working on the word shirt, the very one that baffled Alston, in its garment sense, we attempt
an IS-A hypothesis, such as (99), linguistics offers a standard test to confirm or falsify such
a hypothesis: we do it by negating it as, for instance, in (99ii). If the resulting negative sentence
makes no sense, the semantic element hypothesized about is indeed part of the meaning of the word
(cf. Raskin 1986: 53-54).
(99) (i) A shirt is a garment.
(ii) *I have a shirt but I have no garment.
If, on the other hand, the negation of a hypothesis (100i) makes sense (100ii), the semantic element
hypothesized about is not part of the meaning of the word:
(100) (i) Shirts have collars.
(ii) I have a shirt which has no collar.
This test, which we call “the deniability filter,” weeds out presuppositions, entailments, and inferences
from the meaning of the word proper. Thus, marriage may be firmly associated in the mind
of the native speaker with sexual intercourse, but the deniability filter in (101ii) effectively removes
sex from the meaning of marriage:
(101) (i) Sex is an obligatory aspect of a marriage.
(ii) John and Mary are husband and wife, but they have never made love to each other.
The deniability filter (102ii) confirms the hypothesis (102i) as the only semantic element in the def-