Lexical Rules For Deverbal Adjectives

This work belongs to a family of research efforts, called microtheories and aimed at describing the static meaning of all lexical categories in several languages in the framework of the MikroKosmos project on computational semantics. The latter also involves other static microtheories describing world knowledge and syntax-semantics mapping as well as dynamic microtheories connected with the actual process of text analysis. This paper deals with the microtheory of adjectival semantics in one specific aspect, namely, the optimization and facilitation of the lexical entries for deverbal adjectives with the help:of lexical rules deriving such entries from those of the corresponding verbs. Deverbal adjectives turn out to be the largest single subclass in the adjective lexical category. Unlike scalar and relative adjectives, which are anchored in property and object concepts, respectively, in the underlying ontology, deverbal adjectives are based on process concepts. While acquisition with lexical rules is necessary, universal and efficient for the class of deverbal adjectives, our research shows that, often in spite of the strong appearance to the contrary, such acquisition is neither fully automatic nor cost-free. The work was based on the set of over 6,000 English and about 1,500 Spanish adjectives obtained from taskoriented corpora. The findings are largely language-independent, and only English examples are Used throughout the paper.