Achievement

The diversity of behaviors of adjectives has challenged semantic analyses in which the meaning of the whole, such as 'stone lion', is built systematically from the meaning of the parts, 'stone' and 'lion', where 'stone' functions as an adjective. The set of stone monuments is simply the intersection of the set of stone things and the set of monuments: but the set of stone lions is not the intersection of the set of stone things with the set of lions. This kind of intersective meaning combination also fails for 'small planet' and 'fake gun'; indeed 5 types of adjectival combination have been distinguished. But trainee Michael Oliver has shown how a straightforward analysis in which an adjective always has the same meaning, and all adjectives have the same type of meaning, can explain the diversity of types of adjectival behavior: the combination operation he proposes deploys Optimality Theory, rarely used in semantics, but commonly used in a distant part of linguistics, phonology.