adjective typology

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Tom and others,

     Many thanks.  I will consult that.  René-Joseph Lavie pointed me to Marengo's treatment of how adjective classes predict to some extent those that cannot serve as predicates.  There is the edited book by Dixon and Aikhenvald, and various other typological treatments.  The closest to a full classification system may be the EAGLES system for adjective classification called SIMPLE (Peters & Peters, 2000).  And, as Gwen Frishkoff pointed out to me,  there is the Osgood Semantic Differential which analyzed a few very common adjectives into EPA (evaluation, potency, activity).  But what I was hoping to find was a list with coverage of perhaps a thousand adjectives across a good set of interesting dimensions and it appears, so far, that no such list exists.
   From what Timo says, it may make most sense to construct such a set through machine classification rather than human judgment.  It appears that several groups have worked on this, but I can't find any of their results on line.  I can certainly see the effectiveness of this approach for the syntax-based parts of adjectival classification, but for the qualities and evaluation segments, I would still vote for humans.  We are thinking of a combination of machine techniques and AMT to work on this.  Too bad that there is so little of the results of this work in WordNet or any other public source.

--Brian MacWhinney
 
On Jul 2, 2013, at 2:46 PM, Tom Bartlett <BartlettT at cardiff.ac.uk> wrote:

> I don't know if you're looking for a list or a classificatory framework; if the latter, you might try Gordon Tucker's The Lexicogrammar of adjectives.
> 
> All the best,
> 
> Tom Bartlett.
> 
> CLCR
> Cardiff.
> 
>  
> 
> -----funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu wrote: -----
> To: Funknet <funknet at mailman.rice.edu>
> From: Brian MacWhinney 
> Sent by: funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu
> Date: 02/07/2013 18:09
> Subject: [FUNKNET] adjective typology
> 
> Dear Funknet,
>      Has anyone ever produced an adjective classification along the lines of the Levin classification system for verbs?  In other words, one that breaks adjectives into syntactic/semantic groups. Something in digital format would be best, but printed would be okay too.
> Many thanks for any suggestions on this.  If anyone locates anything, I will post the result to the list.
> 
> --Brian MacWhinney (macw at cmu.edu)