Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Capturing The Adjective, Muffy E. A. Siegel

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

Capturing the Adjective presents a formal, Montague Grammar treatment of an intuitively accessible distinction among adjectives. Many adjective meanings are computed relative to the properties corresponding to the common nouns they modify, but adjectives may also be absolute modifiers of individuals. Marya is a beautiful dancer may mean either that Marya is beautiful as a dancer – she dances beautifully (relative) or that Marya herself is beautiful (absolute).

The dissertation documents the relative/absolute distinction in Russian (where it is morphologically marked as long versus short) and in English (where it is not so marked, and some adjectives are exclusively relative …