Logical types of adjectives and meaning relations in pre- and postnominal positions

In languages in which adjectives appear both pre- and postnominally, adjectives establish different meaning relations with N. Descriptively, we can say that prenominal adjectives “modify components internal to N” (Bouchard 1998). Though I will not provide a fine-grained analysis of these internal components of the lexical structure of nouns, I will assume, with the minimal qualifications to be made below, that nouns contain referential and event variables that can be saturated by different types of predicates, and that they also contain a qualia structure (Pustejovsky 1995); both can be modified by adjectives.

The crucial point underlying the observation just made is that a given adjective can have different readings (R or NR) depending on the position it occupies. One way of approaching this double behavior is to think that its source is the semantic structure of the adjective. Alternatively, we might attribute the double reading to the semantic structure of N, to the extent that this structure is available to the adjective. The second view is the one that I take in this chapter. This approach is in line with the assumption that syntax plays a role in the composition of the meaning of phrases. More specifically, in our idealization of the meaning relation between adjectives and nouns in prenominal syntactic position, the semantics of noun modification by adjectives can be described in the following four ways: (a) modifying the denotation assignment function; (b) modifying central properties; (c) modifying a temporal interval; (d) expressing an extreme property.