Publications

Publication details [#1516]

Sassoon, Galit W. 2013. A Typology of Multidimensional Adjectives. Journal of Semantics 30 : 335–380. 46 pp.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
Advance Access publication

Abstract

The particular study based on corpus material sheds light on how adjectives are interpreted on the basis of multiple and general dimensions. For instance, an adjective such as long cannot be considered being truly multidimensional because of the fact that it accounts only for a temporal and a spatial dimension and it is never interpreted relative to both simultaneously. While adjectives such as healthy presuppose many possible relevant broadly known to everyone dimensions – healthy in what respect?-. Adjectives that behave alike falling under multiple dimensions satisfy the requirement of p instances that would fall under ALL of these dimensions, or alternatively, SOME, MOST, MANY or NONE of these properties. The study semantically supports that positive adjectives are more conjunctive than disjunctive, and more conjunctive than their negative antonyms, whereas negative adjectives are more disjunctive than conjunctive.