This paper analyzes the conjunction of the ‘adjectives of quantity’ many and few with ordinary gradable adjectives. It is shown that the facts surrounding this construction support an analysis of adjectives of quantity as ‘degree predicates’: predicates of intervals on the scale of cardinality. It is further shown that gradable adjectives also have a secondary interpretation as degree predicates.

Many languages have morphological devices to turn a noun into an adjective. Often this morphology is genuinely derivational in that it adds a semantic predicate such as ‘havingN’ (proprietive), ‘lacking-N’ (caritive’), ‘similar-to-N’ (similitudinal) and so on. In other cases the denominal adjective expresses some vaguely defined notion of possession as in Russian Ivan-ovo (detstvo) ‘Ivan’s (chi...

Semantic orientation (SO) for texts is often determined on the basis of the positive or negative polarity, or sentiment, found in the text. Polarity is typically extracted using the positive and negative words in the text, with a particular focus on adjectives, since they convey a high degree of opinion. Not all adjectives are created equal, however. Adjectives found in certain parts of the tex...

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...

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...