This paper investigates the way that lexical semantic properties 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, expanding on previous proposals by further motivating a semantic basis for vagueness and by precisel...

This paper presents the thesis that adjectives and nouns trigger processing by two different cognitive systems, those reported in the literature to be involved in the processing of rulebased versus similarity-based artificially construed categories, respectively. To support this thesis, the paper illuminates a number of links between findings reported in the literature concerning ruleversus sim...

We present a study on the automatic acquisition of semantic classes for Catalan adjectives from distributional and morphological information, with particular emphasis on polysemous adjectives. The aim is to distinguish and characterize broad classes, such as qualitative (gran ‘big’) and relational (pulmonar ‘pulmonary’) adjectives, as well as to identify polysemous adjectives such as econòmic (...

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 act...

One of the best tools we have for probing the lexical semantics of adjectives is degree modification. Different degree modifiers impose different requirements on the adjectives they combine with, and the patterns these restrictions reveal can be used to establish a typology of adjectives. This line of research—pursued by Kennedy & McNally (2005), Rotstein & Winter (2004), and many others since—...

Some restrictions on the order of English premodifying adjectives were already pointed out by Whorf (1956). The first manual corpus studies of the order of premodifying adjectives were carried out by Goyvaerts (1968), Vendler (1968), Quirk and Greenbaum (1973), and Dixon (1982). In all, I have encountered over a hundred of studies concerning the ordering of premodifying adjectives. As a result ...

By 24 months, most children spontaneously and correctly use adjectives. Yet prior laboratory research that has studied lexical acquisition in young children reports that children up to 3-years-old map novel adjectives to object properties only in very limited situations (Child Development 59 (1988) 411; Child Development 64 (1993) 1651; Child Development 71 (2000) 649; Developmental Psychology ...

With this study, a detailed semantic classiication of Modern Greek deverbal adjectives ending in-tos is attempted and the semantic properties of the-tos and-menos deverbal adjectives are contrasted. Traces of an inherited argument structure are detected in the case of-menos, but no such evidence is available for the adjectives in-tos. 1 The problem It has been claimed in the literature (cf. Set...

We present a gold standard for evaluating scale membership and the order of scalar adjectives. In addition to evaluating existing methods of ordering adjectives, this knowledge will aid in studying the organization of adjectives in the lexicon. This resource is the result of two elicitation tasks conducted with informants from Amazon Mechanical Turk. The first task is notable for gathering open...

this article presents a synchronic quantitative study of adjectives in the semantic field of strangeness in a large North American city, toronto, the largest urban center in Canada. the analysis is based on nearly 2,000 adjectives, representing 11 different types, as in She’s really weird and She’s odd. the distribution of these adjectives in apparent time provides startling evidence of change....