A Cognitive Study On English Adjectives Within Adjective-Noun Combinations

Adjectives have long been described as being polysemous. This view comes from the fact that the adjectives receive various interpretations when they modify different nouns. As a result, adjectives have become a thorny issue in natural language processing. This paper takes the adjective-noun combinations as the subject and attempts to investigate adjectives from the perspective of cognitive semantics.The interactions between adjectives and nouns in the adjective-noun combinations are much more complex than most people would have thought. First, qualia structure is introduced to interpret the adjective-noun combinations. However, it can only explain a limited proportion of the combinations and might simplify the complex interactions. In order to give the adjective-noun combination a more convincing explanation, a new approach is proposed which is to investigate the semantic structures of both adjectives and nouns. Then the dynamic construal approach is employed to model the meaning-constructing process of the adjective-noun combinations and the meaning transformation of adjectives throughout the whole process. After all this strenuous work, several important conclusions have been reached.1).The meaning of adjectives remain unchanged when they combine with different nouns. The meaning is constrained by the semantic structures of the nouns, hence the various interpretations of the adjectives.2).There are complex interactions between the adjectives and nouns. Content-biased intrinsic adjectives select and profile the inherent and salient content properties of the nominal meanings, whereas the content-biased extrinsic adjectives take the scope as their direct referent and subcategorize the nouns. Schematicity-biased intrinsic adjectives expressing degrees profile the intrinsic properties of the nominal meanings, while the schematicity-biased extrinsic adjectives expressing frequency, focus, order, or modality apply themselves to the scope of their modified nouns.3).The interpretations of phrases like hard person, social climber, etc involve complex cognitive operations such as metaphorization and metonymization. Most of the time encyclopedic knowledge is called for to interpret these phrases.