Adjectives in layers

Conceptualizing Adjectives Conceptualizing Adjectives Conceptualizing Adjectives

We specify a model for the conceptual interpretation of relative adjectives (like \big"), which covers a crucial aspect of the underlying comprehension process { the comparison to a norm that is associated with a comparison class. Building on an elaborate domain ontology and knowledge about intercorrelations, comparison classes are dynamically created depending on the context in which adjectiva...

Nouns as Adjectives and Adjectives as Nouns

Many languages have morphological devices to turn a noun into an adjective. Often this morphology is genuinely derivational in that it adds a semantic predicate such as ‘havingN’ (proprietive), ‘lacking-N’ (caritive’), ‘similar-to-N’ (similitudinal) and so on. In other cases the denominal adjective expresses some vaguely defined notion of possession as in Russian Ivan-ovo (detstvo) ‘Ivan’s (chi...

Adjectives in TreeLex

The paper presents an ongoing project on automatic extraction of subcategorization frames of French adjectives. The extraction method is guided by syntactic corpus annotations and heuristic rules. In particular, we use general linguistic knowledge to distinguish constituents inherent to impersonal, comparative and certain adverbial constructions from subcategorized complements.

Evaluational Adjectives*

The literature on predicates of personal taste (PPTs) has focused on a surprisingly limited range of expressions. This narrow focus has led to problematic theoretical conclusions about the syntax and semantics. I argue that PPTs are an instance of a more interesting general category of (what I call) evaluational predicates. Like other gradable adjectives, PPTs are sensitive to a relevant degree...

Adjectives in Context