Mental State Adjectives: the Perspective of Generative Lexicon

Abstract

This paper focusses on mental state adjectives and offers a unified analysis in the theory of Generative Lexicon (Pustejovsky, 1991, 1995). We show that, instead of enumerating the various syntactic constructions they enter into, with the different senses which arise, it is possible to give them a rich typed semantic representation which will explain both their semantic and syntactic polymorphism.