Mystery Number Two - Computational Linguistics and Talking Robots - page 47

is marked, e.g., schöner , schöne , schönes , etc., while the adverbial, e.g.,
schön , is unmarked.
The relations between English adjectives with the cat values adnv, adn, and
adv may be shown as follows (cf. NLC'06, Chap. 15):

3.5.4 R ELATION BETWEEN THE adnv, adn, AND adv VALUES IN E NGLISH

adjective
on the table
here, fast,

[cat: adnv]

adnominal [cat: adn]
beautiful

adverbial [cat: adv]
beautifully

The part of speech is adjective. It can modify nouns as well as verbs, indicated
by the cat value adnv . This value characterizes the combinatorics of prepo-
sitional phrases like on the table , indexical adjectives like here , and certain
symbol adjectives like fast . If an adjective has two forms, e.g., beautiful and
beautifully , the unmarked form has the cat value adn (adnominal use) in En-
glish, while the marked form has the cat value adv (adverbial use).
Finally, we turn to the traditional parts of speech which share the core at-
tribute verb in DBS. These are finite verbs, auxiliaries, and participles:

3.5.5 A NALYZING DIFFERENT VERB FORMS AS LEXICAL PROPLETS

finite main verb finite auxiliary non-finite main verb

⎡
⎣

⎤
⎦

⎡
⎣

⎤
⎦

⎡
⎣

⎤
⎦

sur: knows
verb: know
cat: ns3 a v
sem: ind pres
mdr:
arg:
prn:

sur: is
verb: v_1
cat: ns3 be v
sem: ind pres
mdr:
arg:
prn:

sur: knowing
verb: know
cat: a be
sem: prog
mdr:
arg:
prn:

Finite verb forms are characterized by a cat value ending with the constant
v . This holds for main verbs and auxiliaries alike. The difference between the
two is that auxiliaries, but not main verbs, have the constant be , hv ,or do
as part of their categories (cf. FoCL9, Sect. 17.3). Also, the core value of an

In DBS, “adjective” is the part of speech, which can be used adnominally and adverbially. There-
fore “adjective” is used to refer to adnv expressions without morphological restrictions, “adnominal”
for adn expressions morphologically restricted to noun modification, and “adverbial” for adv expres-
sions morphologically restricted to verb modification.
In other words, DBS distinguishes between adjectives according to what they modify, regardless
of which of the semantic relations happen to be morphologically marked or unmarked in the natural
language at hand.