Acquisition of Adjective Meanings : A Lexical Semantic Approach

This thesis explored the possibility of deriving constraints on the acquisition of adjective meanings from knowledge of the semantics of adjectives. Chapter 1 briefly reviews the problem of learning the meanings of words and possible classes of solutions. It is proposed that an important source of constraint on the meanings of novel words can be derived from studying adult's knowledge of language and how it is related to nonlinguistic cognition. In Chapter 2, I propose a semantic analysis of adjectives and how they combine with their arguments in different structural relations. It is proposed that there are two kinds of adjectives. The first kind of adjectives name properties of things. These adjectives name values along dimensions. Adjectives that name values on dimensions are proposed to combine with nouns in two ways. In predication, these adjectives name the value that the entity named by the subject has on the relevant dimension. In modification, the value named by the adjective is used to pick out the objects of the kind named by its argument. The second type of adjectives are those that do not name values on dimensions but combine with nouns to pick out kinds of things. The semantic analysis presented here is based on structural notions and is not meant to be in conflict with syntactic theories though the semantics are used to explain certain phenomena which may also have syntactic explanations. In the rest of this thesis I show how this knowledge of the semantics of adjectives can explain a number of linguistic and psycholinguistic facts as well as motivate heuristics for the acquisition of adjective meanings. The third chapter investigated the constraints on structures and the interpretation of structures that follow from the semantics of modification. It was found that the semantic analysis of adjectives can be used to explain why adjectives cannot modify NPs (*big the dog), pronouns (*big he), proper names (*big John) and quantified expressions (*the big one dog). Furthermore, the semantic analysis of adjectives provided an explanation for when prenominal adjectives can be interpreted as being modificational and when they have to be interpreted appositively.