Lexical Semantics of Adjectives - CiteSeerX

inition of marriage:
57
(102) (i) Marriage is legal procedure which makes two people which undergo it with each
other married to each other.
(ii) *John and Mary are husband and wife but they have never undergone any legal
procedure making them so.
By the same token, an adjective like round can be described, using the property of shape (103i-successfully)
or the property of ability to roll (104i--unsuccessfully):
(103) (i) Roundness is a shape
(ii) *I saw a round object, which had no particular shape.
(104) (i) Roundness means the ability to roll.
(ii) I saw a round object, but it could not roll.
At this point, we are ready to see how the algorithm in (98) helps us in the process of acquisition.
The first decision to make is whether the adjective modifies semantically the noun it modifies syntactically.
The decision is made much easier for us by the finding that all those adjectives which
definitely do not are of a temporal nature (see, for instance, example (40) above). Our framework
assigns temporal information to events, and it properly belongs together with the aspect-related information
in modality.
The next question to answer is whether the adjective is an attitude or a property. We have two attitudes,
evaluative and saliency, so all the evaluation-attribute adjectives, such as good, bad, superb,
awful, etc. (see example (45) above), and the saliency-attribute adjectives, such as important,
unimportant, significant, prominent, etc. (see examples (53ii) and (59) above) belong here. All other
adjectives are treated as properties.
We are approaching the most critical part of the procedure, but there is one “easy” question left: is
the adjective a morphological derivative of a noun or a verb, such that the meaning of the adjective
“follows” from the meaning of the underlying noun or verb. This is particularly easy to establish
when the morphological derivation follows the standard N--->Adj or V--->Adj route, such as in
(105i-ii). If a noun and a verb of the same root may both claim an adjective, we give preference to
the latter (106). It is a little less trivial to relate an adjective to an underlying verb, for instance,
“suppletively,” which can, of course be done only semantically, as in (107--cf. (71)).
(105) (i) abusive