Summary

The framework presented for systematizing adjective meanings is one that explains meanings in terms of a limited number of relationships between the senses of words. The following four sense relations were defined and illustrated: synonymy, complementarity, antonymy and converseness. In the process of doing semantic description, entailments between sentences are the evidence for sense relations between words. And, going the other way, the sense relations in a semantic description indicate the entailment potentials of words. In formal semantics, meaning postulates carry this information. Gradability – a feature of antonyms, but not of complementaries – was explained. It was observed that the modification of nouns by adjectives cannot be fully accounted for in terms of the intersection of sets denoted by the words.