The Semantic Classification of Adjectives. A View from Syntax

The need to distinguish two syntactic sources for adnominal adjectives (a direct modification and a relative clause one), with the associated interpretive properties, turns out to have certain implications for the semantic classification of adjectives. We will see that it provides evidence for the existence of a class of truly privative adjectives, and for the conclusion that subsective adjectives of the tall/big type and of the skillful/good type cannot be reduced for the direct modification class to (context-sensitive) intersectivity. Furthermore, the available syntactic evidence appears to converge with Partee’s more recent position that the principal divide is between predicative and non predicative adjectives, which correspond in the adnominal case to the relative clause and direct modification sources, respectively.