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.

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...

WordNet divides adjectives in descriptives and relationals basically and they are represented in an enumerative way. The category was not introduced in EuroWordNet and Spanish adjectives in the SpanishWordNet are the translation of the English synsets. This paper describes a proposal of organizing and incorporating adjectives into the SpanishWordNet in terms of representing its polymorphic beha...

An expression is vague, if its meaning is not precise. For vagueness at the sentence-level this means that a vague sentence does not give rise to precise truth conditions. This is a problem for the standard theory of meaning within linguistics, because this theory presupposes that each sentence has a precise meaning with respect to each context of use. The philosophical discussion on ‘vagueness...

This paper is devoted to a particular aspect of the interpretation of evaluative adjectives (marvelous, horrible), that is, adjectives that are compatible with subjective attitude verbs like find in the construction find x adj (e.g. find marvelous) and give rise to the so-called ‘faultless disagreement’ pattern. 1 Evaluative adjectives have often been claimed to manifest a strong, and even excl...

Despite their simple syntactic form, adjective-noun combinations seem to have no straightforward semantic method that parallels the simplicity of the syntax. This has led to the conventional belief that adjectives belong to a (semantically motivated) hierarchy. This has the consequence that a uniform treatment of adjectives is unattainable—without resorting to notions such as possible worlds, w...

Introduction Property adjectives such as green, round, or old define a property of their argument; when combined with a noun, the property is attributed to the referent of the noun. Adjectives of this sort can be thought to define classes in their own right, such as the green ones or the round ones. Relational or classificatory adjectives, such as nuclear, dental, or musical, in contrast, do no...