The grammar adj-descr-p.grm
is to cover descriptive adjectives in general. At present it is very
incomplete because English has so many descriptive adjectives. However
it does include adjectives of size from the grammar adjfunction.grm
as well as modifiers for making comparative and superlative forms of descriptive
adjectives (e.g. "more similar", "most ") and for building conjunctive
lists of descriptive adjectives (e.g. "very large, brighter and more beautiful")
and interrogatives ("how wet"). Syntactic classes defined in
this module include a phrase type ADJ-DESCR-GRADABLE for "gradable"
adjectives [Quirk, 5.24, 7.4] like "large", "green", and "good", which
can be modified by adverbs that indicate their strength: (e.g., "fairly
large ", "rather large", "very large",) -- see grader.grm.
Among such gradable adjectives, some are what I would call "completable"
in that they can be modified by "completely", "entirely", "totally", and
the like. Examples are "entirely green", "totally unscrupulous",
"completely calm". Other gradable adjectives are not normally completable
in the same way (e.g., "large", "small", "fast", "slow"), but that distinction
will be left to semantic feature computations rather than being treated
as a syntactic matter. Still other properties of adjectives, including
rules for their ordering [Quirk, 7.45] have not been dealt with in this
version of the grammar module. Also, many adverbial modifiers of
adjectives other than the ones in grader.grm are not yet included
in the grammar.