Adjective meanings

According to Cruse (2000:289), adjectives are often one-dimensional. That becomes a starting
point to understand word meaning. This chapter mainly revolves around oppositeness and
similarity, however, three other topics are broached: meaning postulates, gradability and how to
account when adjectives modify nouns.
Sense relations to adjectives
The notion of entailment was mentioned in chapter 1.it is the Proposition that follows when a
given word proposition is true. If it is true that teacher has arrived in UEM, that it has got to be
true that is thereabouts in the institution; they are willy-nilly understood and therefore spare our
time when we are communicating.
Synonym
Synonymy is the equivalence of sense. When a single word is replaced in a sentence by a
synonym, than its literal meaning does not change. As explained in the previous chapter, literal
meaning is abstracted away from contexts of use.
Paraphrases- are two sentences with the same meaning. When two sentences have the same
meaning they’re paraphrases and so entail one another, yet they go both waystoo, as shown in the
example below:
1. Ana is beautiful
2. Ana is cute.
Beautiful and cute are synonyms and can replace one another.
If you said Ana is beautiful, that means that she is cute, plus, if you said Ana is cute, that
means she is cute.
Moreover, synonyms can be found in other classes.
Truck- lorry- nouns
Depart- leave- verb
Quickly-fast- adverb
Nevertheless, we can find triplets: sofa, settee, couch.
Complementaries
Patterns of entailment illustrating contrast between two adjectives without remainder.
They bring an absolute, polar, understanding about a given term, right or wrong, for
instance give no room for a neither right not wrong middle ground. Something can only
be right or wrong.

Antonyms
Is defined by a pattern of entailments where is 1. Is true than 2. Can be wrong, with a
remainder of a middle ground, as for example.
1. The house is clean
2. The house is dirty.
 Considering 1. True we can assume 2. To be false, however there’s no certainty in
saying so, which leads us to consider a middle ground of being neither clean nor
dirty.
Conversion
A general feature in antonym, whereby comparative suffixes(-er) or constructions(more), can be
added to an adjective in order to express a comparative form in their antonyms, as for
example(shorter\longer).
Maputo katembe bridges longer than the many other Mozambican bridges,
The many other bridges are shorter than Maputo Katembe.

Meaning postulates
Developed by Philosopher Rupert Carnap, in order to integrate into logical systems, the
entailment information that comes from word meaning.
Rupert is a friend of mine
And if he is a friend of mine, then I am willing to lend him my bicycle.
Therefore, I am willing to lend Ruppert my bicycle.
This type of reasoning is only valid if the two first statements are true.
Gradability

Another general feature found in adjectives, has to do with the way we can apply different level
or degrees ( using adverbs, for instance) in order to establish a level of understanding we may
want to denote.

Blood is thicher than water.

How hard could it even get?