Adjectives: A Uniform Semantic Approach - University of Windsor

Adjectives: A Uniform Semantic Approach 339
This reflects the intuition that the sentence Jane is an attractive (blond woman)
expresses a different proposition from that expressed by the sentence Jane is an
attractive, blond woman. The latter reading would result in the inclusion of the
element “w: woman” in the set Attractive.
Finally, narrow-scope readings are computed differently. The narrow scopereading
of an (attractive blond) woman is attributing “attractive-blond-ness” to the
denotation of Jane. Such a reading is depicted in Fig 3.
Fig. 3. Narrow-scope reading of Jane is an attractive blond woman
Notice that the set Attractive-blond is of type “attractive-blond”. This results from
applying the type formation rule of (11-c). The set representation of the narrow-scope
reading is as follows:
Attractive-blond = {w:T}: attractive-blond
Woman = {w: woman}: woman
Attractive-blond ∩ Woman = {w:attractive-blond:woman}:
attractive-blond: woman
Thus, a semantic interpreter will have two or more different syntactic trees as input,
each of which is treated differently semantically.
4 Consequences
• This work emphasizes the semantic unity of the category called “adjective”,
contrary to [16]. In this regards, this work agrees with [8]. However, it does so
without “stretching” the ontology to contain events/states, as [8] does.
Furthermore, using typed sets, we were able to account for the semantics of
phrases with multiple adjectives.
• This approach is compositional. It is true, at least in the case of adjectives in
English, that adjectives can syntactically appear exclusively predicative (e.g.
‘asleep’), exclusively attributive (e.g. ‘veteran’), or in on both positions (e.g.
‘good’), but there is always a single semantic rule that computes the respective
meaning of the adjective noun-combination, namely the intersection of the
denotation of adjective(s) and the head noun.
• This approach is easily applied in a natural language processing system. This is
because it is based on a well-defined mathematical system, i.e. set theory.