Re: THEORY: Deriving adjectives from nouns

Joshua Shinavier wrote:
>
> > Consider that "pretty" can mean "attractive" or "quite", thus it could
> > be "attractive little girls' school" or "quite little girls' school".  I
> > can see the following meanings (ignoring the phonological ambiguity
> > between "girl's" and "girls'"
>
> I think we were deliberately excluding both of those -- pretty = beautiful,
> not very in this case.
Yes, but it was good to point out that kind of ambiguity.

> I also assumed one specific role for the genetive of
> "girls'" as well -- belonging to girls, for girls, run by girls, whatever;
> you could think of any number of possible interpretations for this "of" link;
> I've handled them all as one relation -- otherwise, yes, there are far more
> than ten interpretations, but I don't care to count them all!
About genitives ... there isn't just one type.
English uses both subjective and objective types, as in
"the conquest of Carthage by Rome" -> "a conquest of Rome.
(That gets into adjectives too, "a Roman conquest".)
English also has one "inverse" form, "'s", a vague type.
So I guess there would be 5 possible genitives in total.