Previous research indicates that political conservatism is associated with epistemic needs for structure and certainty (Jost et al., 2003) and that nouns elicit clearer and more definite perceptions of reality than other parts of speech (Carnaghi et al., 2008). We therefore hypothesized that conservatives would exhibit preferences for nouns (vs. verbs and adjectives), insofar as nouns are bette...

This paper deals with the treatment of constructed neologisms in a machine translation system. It focuses on a particular issue in Romance languages: relational adjectives and the role they play in prefixation. Relational adjectives are formally adjectives but are semantically linked to their base-noun. In prefixation processes, the prefix is formally attached to the adjective, but its semantic...

In this paper we propose a small set of lexical conceptual relations which allow to encode adjectives in computational relational lexica in a principled and integrated way. Our main motivation comes from the fact that adjectives and certain classes of verbs, related in a way or another with adjectives, do not have a satisfactory representation in this kind of lexica. This is due to a great exte...

This work provides the first experimental evidence that adults and children as young as three years of age distinguish between three types of gradable adjective meanings – relative, absolute maximum standard, and absolute minimum standard – based on the role of the context in setting the standard of comparison. These results lend support to a typology of gradable adjectives determined by abstra...

This paper examines the role of gradable properties in referring expressions, from a perspective of natural language generation. Firstly, we propose a simple semantic analysis of vague descriptions (i.e., referring expressions that contain gradable adjectives) that reflects the context-dependent meaning of the adjectives in them. Secondly, we show how this type of analysis can inform algorithms...

Most authors agree that adjective semantic analysis and representation is far from being a trivial issue. Since the semantic organisation of adjectives seems to be unlike that of nouns and verbs, as noted by Fellbaum et al (1993) and Miller (1998), this paper focuses on the encoding of adjectives in wordnets. We discuss the strategies used in WordNet.PT. Our proposal aims at mirroring adjective...

This paper argues that Korean lacks a distinct, open category of Adjective; what have been traditionally analyzed as adjectives are a kind of stative verbs. I propose that apparent noun-modifying adjectives in Korean are predicates inside relative clauses. The proposed analysis makes several predictions about the syntax and semantics of noun modifiers in Korean. In particular, it predicts that ...

Three experiments examined the conditions under which infants acquiring English succeed in mapping novel adjectives, applied ostensively to individual objects, to other objects with the same property (color or texture). Twenty-one-month-old infants were introduced to a target (e.g., a yellow object) and asked to choose between (1) a matching test object (e.g., a different yellow object) and (2)...

The need to distinguish two syntactic sources for adnominal adjectives (a direct modification and a relative clause one), with the associated interpretive properties, turns out to have certain implications for the semantic classification of adjectives. We will see that it provides evidence for the existence of a class of truly privative adjectives, and for the conclusion that subsective adjecti...