On pre-nominal classifying adjectives in Polish 231
entities which are mammals and the set of entities which exhibit the property of being
carnivorous (see Bouchard 2002: 8).
Other adjectives may modify some sub-component internal to the N. Subsective
adjectives, e.g. big in big butterfly, small in small elephant, skillful in skillful liar or skill-
ful surgeon, or tall in the tall president, are interpreted “relative to the N” they modify.
A big butterfly is smaller than a small elephant, while a tall president may be shorter
than a short basketball player. Moreover, as Bouchard observes, a skillful surgeon may
be incompetent as a liar, while a skillful liar may be an inept surgeon.
(20) a. small elephant
b. big butterfly
c. tall president
d. skillful liar
e. skillful surgeon
Intensional adjectives (which are neither subsective nor intersective in the adjectival
typology postulated in Kamp & Partee 1995) are represented by such English items
as alleged, false, perfect, future, and their equivalents in French (as illustrated in (21)):
(21) a. ce supposé communisté ‘the alleged communist’
b. le futur président ‘the future president’
(Bouchard 1998: 140)
The French adjective supposé ‘alleged’ in the phrase in (21a) modifies the denotation
assignment function f (i.e. the characteristic function f) of the noun communisté ‘c o m-
munist’ so the entity denoted by the phrase supposé communisté is not an object which
falls in the extension of the concept of communisté. The French adjective futur ‘future’
modifies “the interval time i at which the denotation assignment function président
holds for some individual” (Bouchard 1998: 141). The extension of the nominal future
président is not an intersection of sets of entities which are future and sets of entities
which are presidents (“a future president is neither future nor president”, as is observed
in Bouchard 2002: 8).
In the neo-Saussurean approach advocated by Denis Bouchard, syntax is viewed
as “a part of the system of signs: syntax provides a signifiant to a combination of sig-
nifiés” (Bouchard 2009: 263). Languages differ in the means they conventionally
employ to express the signifié, i.e. the relation between the functor (head) and the
dependent. One of those means is Juxtaposition,^8 understood as the temporal ordering
- As is explained by Bouchard (2002, 2009 ), the remaining combinatorial means include
Superimposition (e.g. superimposition of a focus or question intonation, or tone in tone lan-
guages), Dependent marking (e.g. the attachment of case suffixes in Latin), and Head marking
(e.g. object marking on the verb in Mohawk).