Roles and the compositional semantics of role-denoting relational adjectives

Abstract

The semantics of adjectives related to nominals denoting societal roles, such aspresidential (from president), have remained understudied. We examine the semantics of whatwe call role-denoting relational adjectives, providing a formal analysis using the notion of aframe, a unified representation for lexical knowledge, world knowledge, and context. The frameswe propose are based on a constructivist philosophical understanding of social roles, leading usto posit a multi-tiered ontology of events and individuals. Using frames and our ontology, weprovide a general semantics for role-denoting relational adjectives and roles.Keywords: modification, adjectives, relational adjectives, events, non-intersective adjectives,roles, natural language metaphysics, frame semantics.