This paper introduces and provides a linguistic analysis of Discourse Adjectives (Taranto, 2003), a natural class whose members include apparent, evident, clear, and obvious, and contrasts them with another class of proposition-taking adjectives; a class that will be referred to here as “Attitude Adjectives” (absurd, intriguing, ridiculous). The identification Discourse Adjectives, and their co...

To investigate perceptual and neural correlates of future self-appraisals as a function of temporal distance, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants (11 women, eight men) made judgments about the applicability of trait adjectives to their near future selves (i.e., one month from now) and their distant future selves (i.e., three years from now). Behavioral results indic...

We study how a robot can link concepts represented by adjectives and nouns in language with its own sensorimotor interactions. Specifically, an iCub humanoid robot interacts with a group of objects using a repertoire of manipulation behaviors. The objects are labeled using a set of adjectives and nouns. The effects induced on the objects are labeled as affordances, and classifiers are learned t...

This paper provides a new account of positive versus negative antonyms. The data includes well known linguistic generalizations regarding negative adjectives, such as their incompatibility with measure-phrases (cf., two meters tall/ *short) and ratio-phrases (twice as tall/ #short), as well as the impossibility of truly cross-polar comparisons (*Dan is taller than Sam is short). These generaliz...

In the systemic framework, lexis has received little attention in comparison to grammar. The paper compares existing systemic approaches to lexis and outlines a model for describing lexical items from the viewpoint of realization of communicative intentions by lexical items using the systemic network of lexical choices. As an example of the approach, the paper attempts to describe contrastive l...

Why do children learn nouns such as cup faster than dimensional adjectives such as big? Most explanations of this well-known phenomenon rely on prior knowledge in the child of the nounadjective distinction or on the logical priority of nouns as the arguments of predicates. In this paper we examine an alternative account, one which seeks to explain the relative ease of nouns over adjectives in t...

This paper investigates the way that grammatical (lexical semantic) features of linguistic expressions influence vagueness, focusing on the interpretation of the positive (unmarked) form of gradable adjectives. I begin by developing a semantic analysis of the positive form of ‘relative’ gradable adjectives, in which vagueness derives from the truth conditions of the predicate, which require an ...

We report the results of a systematic study of the feasibility of automatically classifying documents by genre using adjectives and adverbs as indicators of affective language. In addition to the class of adjectives and adverbs, we focus on two specific subsets of adjectives and adverbs: (1) trait adjectives, used by psychologists to assess human personality traits, and (2) speaker-oriented adv...