Mental State Adjectives: the Perspective of Generative Lexicon

Mental State Adjectives: the Perspective of Generative Lexicon Pierrette Bouillon ISSCO, University of Geneva 54, route des Acacias 1227 Geneva, Switzerland pb~divsun, unige, ch Abstract This paper focusses on mental state ad- jectives and offers a unified analysis in the theory of Generative Lexicon (Puste- jovsky, 1991, 1995). We show that, in- stead of enumerating the various syntac- tic constructions they enter into, with the different senses which arise, it is pos- sible to give them a rich typed semantic representation which will explain both their semantic and syntactic polymor- phism. 1 Introduction Recently, work in computational semantics and lexical semantics has made an interesting shift. Motivated by a concern for lexical organization and global coherence in the structure of lexicon, some researchers have moved towards nlore ex- pressive semantic descriptions, as well as more powerful methods of combining them (see for ex- ample Pustejovsky, 1991, 1995; Briscoe, 1993). This article will exploit one of these theories, The Generative Lezicon (GL: Pustejovsky, 1995), and extend it for the treatment of French mental adjectives. The following section summarizes the problematic behaviour of these adjectives. The GL approach is then described, and a GL analysis of the data. 2 The Data Mental adjectives which denote an emotional state or a competence (agent-oriented, fol- lowing Ernst, 1983) present interesting syntactic and semantic polymorphic behaviour, as noted in the literature (see for example Leh~er, 1990 and Croft, 1984). In this paper, we focus on the rep- resentative members of these classes in I and Ih We would like to thank James Pustejovsky for exten- sire discussions on the data presented in this article. Thanks also to Laurence Danlos and Graham Russell for their conunents. I Emotional adjectives: triste 'sad', furieuz 'angry, furious', irritg 'irritated', heureuz 'happy', ennuyg 'bored'. II Agent-orlented adjectives: intelligent, ingdnieuz 'clever', habile 'skilful', adroit 'dex- trous'. Both classes of adjectives exhibit the property of syntactic polyvalency, being able to appear in several distinct contexts, with optional com- plement structures (as illustrated in (1), (2) and (3)). In the case of agent-oriented adjectives, the complement expresses the manifestation of the state and call be realized as an infinitive with d/pour or de (examples (2a,b)) or a prepositional phrase (2c): (2a,b,c)means that somebody is skil- ful in what he does or how he does it (see Croft, 1984). (1) Cet homme est triste/habile/furieux "This man is sad/clever/angry TM (2) a. Cet homme est habile de partir "This man is skilful to leave" b. Cet homme est habile £/pour tricher "This man is skilful at cheating" c. Cet homme est habile au bridge "This man is skilful at bridge" In the case of emotional state adjectives, this complement typically expresses the cause of the emotional state and may be realized as an de- infinitive or a que-sentence: (3a,b), for exam- ple, means that somebody is sad/angry because of something. Notice however that, in some contexts, the complement can also refer to the manifesta- tion of the state, as for agent-orlented adjec- tives (3c). (3) …

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