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<Paper uid="W96-0310">
  <Title>Lexical Rules for Deverbal Adjectives</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="90" type="abstr">
    <SectionTitle>
1. Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The general toPic of this paper is the information about adjectival meaning which should be included in a computational lexicon. Having addressed this general topic elsewhere (Raskin and Nirenburg 1995), we focus here on a more specific topic of the meaning of deverbal adjectives and, even more specifically, on the lexical rules used to derive the meanings of such adjectives from those of the corresponding verbs.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> An extensive literature review in Raskin and Nirenburg (1995: 3-20) has demonstrated a focus on a number of issues that the non-computational linguistics of adjectives has deemed important.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> These include adjective taxonomies, usually on the basis of more or less consistent external criteria, the dichotomy between predicating and non-predicating adjectives and the related dichotomy between qualitative and relative adjectives, the order of adjectives modifying the same noun, the degrees of comparison and scalability, and the substantivization of adjectives.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> We have shown also (Raskin and Nirenburg 1995: 24-27) that computational lexicography and computational semantics impose totally different parameters of relevance on these issues. We discovered that developing adjective semantics for an application modifies many popular views on the subject. It becomes clear, for instance, that  mantics of adjectives only partially reflects their possible syntactic distinctions; * the major distinction among adjectives is scalar vs. non-scalar; * the attributive/predicative distinction, dominating the current scholarship on the adjective, has virtually no semantic significance, thus essentially crushing any hope to derive meaning from deep syntactic analysis; * there is a significant gap in our knowledge about relations between truly relative adjectives (as well as nominal modifiers in English) and the nouns they modify; * the typology of scales for gradables emerges as the dominant issue in adjective semantics and lexicography.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Most importantly for this paper, the crucial taxonomic criterion for each adjective is its anchoring in the underlying ontology. Whether such an anchor is a property, object, or process concept defines the adjective as truly scalar, relative (denominal), or deverbal, respectively.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> The existing literature on adjectives also shows a predictable scarcity of systematic semantic analyses or lexicographic descriptions of adjectives. The quantifier adjectives, being the closest natural language comes to formal logic, have been privileged in this respect--see, for instance, Jackendoff (1983), McCawley (1988: 594-630), Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet (1990: 406-430), Frawley (1992: 464-480). The second luckiest category is adjectives of measure, especially spatial and, to a lesser degree, temporal, which are also seen as being more logically structured (see Bierwisch 1967, 1989, Greimas 1966, Teller 1969, Zhurinskiy 1971, Dowty 1972, Siegel 1976:107-149 and 1979, Spang-Hanssen 1990, Spejewski 1995, and others).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> Obviously, the semantic analysis of adjectives shares many problems with the semantic analysis of anything in natural language. One specific problem, noted by very few scholars, is what Marx (1983--see also Marx 1977 and Szalay and Deese 1978) refers to as the &amp;quot;plasticity&amp;quot; of adjectival meaning, namely that the same adjective can emphasize a different property of a noun in a different context. Lahav (1989), working loosely in the Keenan and Faltz (1985) paradigm, presents the same property as the non-compositionality of adjectives. If, he argues, red birds, red houses, and red books mean all different kinds of redness--and they do--how can one derive the meaning of an Adj N combination from the meaning of the adjective and the noun? In other words, each noun, he believes, influences the meaning of the adjective. Katz (1972: 752), analyzing the meaning of good, is virtually the only author to have come up with a specific, even if definitely not complete account of how this works. Certain classes of nouns, he asserts, offer specific properties for good to work on: &amp;quot;It\]he respects in which evaluations of things c,,an be made differ with differences in the other semantic features of the words that refer to those things.' (Artifact) permits evaluation of uses; (Component of a system) functions; (Role) duties; (OrnamentaUon) purposes; (Food) pleasurability and healthfulness; there are many others.&amp;quot; This situation, in which semantic analyses and lexicographic descriptions of adjectives (and other categories) are rare, is bound to change rapidly. As computational semantics moves to large-scale systems serving non-toy domains, the need for large lexicons with entries of all lexical categories in them is becoming increasingly acute, and the attention of computational semanticists and lexicographers is turning more towards such previously neglected or avoided categories as the adjectives. Recently, there have appeared some first indications of this attention--see, for instance, Smadja (1991), Beckwith et al. (1991), Bouillon and Viegas (1994), Justeson and Katz (1991, 1995), Pustejovsky (1995: 20-23). This research is a step in the same direction.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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