REASONING WITH INTENSIONAL NEGATIVE ADJECTIVALS - SEMANTICS, PRAGMATICS, AND CONTEXT

Intensional negative adjectives alleged, artificial, fake, false, form er, and toy are unusual adjectives that depending on context may or ma y not be restricting functions. A formal theory of their semantics, pr agmatics, and context that uniformly accounts for their complex mathem atical and computational characteristics and captures some peculiariti es of individual adjectives is presented. Such adjectives are formaliz ed as new concept builders, negation-like functions that operate on th e values of intensional properties of the concepts denoted by their ar guments and yield new concepts whose intensional properties have value s consistent with the negation of the old values. Understanding these new concepts involves semantics, pragmatics and context-dependency of natural language. It is argued that intensional negative adjectives ca n be viewed as a special-purpose, weaker, context-dependent negation i n natural language. The theory explains and predicts many inferences l icensed by expressions involving such adjectives. Implementation of sa mple examples demonstrates its computational feasibility. Computation of context-dependent interpretation is discussed. The theory allows on e to enhance a knowledge representation system with similar concept bu ilding, negation-like, context-dependent functions, the availability o f which appears to be a distinct characteristic of natural languages.