Perfective and imperfective adjectives?

[freknu]

Would it be too strange to use the aspect terms perfective and imperfective for describing the following two types of adjectives?

perfective — magnitude of possessed state

pos. hvít "being white"
com. hvítan "being more white"
sup. hvítast "being most white"

imperfective — proximity to possessing state

pos. deuf "being deaf"
com. deufan "being closer to deaf"
sup. deufast "being closest to deaf"

[Daniel]

Aspect is about a relationship with time. That doesn't seem like quite the right term here, and I haven't seen it used with adjectives.

What about something more along the lines of lexical aspect or Aktionsart? It's slightly different, despite the similar terminology. Specifically, that distinction seems to be along the lines of telicity.

However, I also wonder about the assumptions you're making with regards to the lexical meaning. Perhaps "deaf" actually means "has trouble hearing" rather than "cannot hear at all". Is there a way to distinguish that in the grammar?

[freknu]

Hmm... telicity may actually be a better quality.

However, I also wonder about the assumptions you're making with regards to the lexical meaning. Perhaps "deaf" actually means "has trouble hearing" rather than "cannot hear at all". Is there a way to distinguish that in the grammar?

Well, the same pattern emerges with blind "blind", deuð "dead", feil "wrong, false", heil "whole", sondr "broken, asunder", and so on.

If you want to say that someone is a little deaf:

lilldeuf "little-deaf (hearing impaired)"
smádeuf "little-deaf (hearing impaired)"
halfdeuf "half-deaf (hardhearing)"
halft deuf "partially deaf"
nagit lítit deuf "some little deaf"
nagit smátt deuf "some little deaf"
svagheyrð "weak-heard"
heyr svagt "hears weakly"
hafr svárt ti heyr "has difficulty to hear"
ná deuf (nér deuf) "near deaf (almost deaf)"

Also:

steindeuf "stone-deaf (deaf without a doubt)"
deyf (causative from deuf) "to make deaf"
dǿf (causative from dof "dull, numb") "to make dull, hardhearing"

Not that I can rule out entirely that it doesn't have a partial quality as well, but as I mentioned earlier "deuf" isn't the only word.

[Daniel]

This seems to be a question of boundedness, but that's also somewhat arbitrary. If someone yells "are you blind?!" because you don't see some detail in a painting, then apparently that bit of not being able to see is enough to set a limit for "can (not) see"/"blind". Obviously that's a metaphorical use, but the point is that the speaker can determine where the effective cutoff point is, and it varies.

There's a distinction between having absolutely no sense of sight at all (equivalent to not having eyes) and being effectively blind or, for example, "legally blind". Many blind individuals actually can see a bit-- some might just see very blurry images, while others might be able to get a general sense of lightness and darkness (and some may get no visual input at all).

There may also be some issues of coercion here-- "blind" seems like, if we take it as a cutoff, something that can't be compared. "More dead" is often given as an example of an impossible comparative, and prescriptive grammars recommend against "most unique" and so forth because there's no comparison by definition. But by coercion we actually can say "more dead", in a context where there's something to compare.


The deeper problem here is that many adjectives (possibly all) are highly sensitive to context. "Tall" is the typical example:
A tall basketball player.
A tall kindergartener.

There's a huge difference in those even though "tall" seems to have the same meaning.

Many or most adjectives work like this. In fact, all might, in the right circumstances.


Anyway, the main distinction you're making is boundedness. If you want to think of it in terms of degrees and as parallel to verbs then possibly telicity is relevant. But that isn't the standard use of the term either, really. That's an issue of whether an action is completed, not whether some property is completely true of a thing. You could make that extension though!

[freknu]

Well, I didn't know of adjectival term that seemed to fit, so perfective (completed, singluar) versus imperfective (ongoing, iterative) seemed like a possible first try. Since they are adjectives they don't actually have any quality of tense, but I couldn't find much else.

If the quality is "boundedness", what would the states be then? That's the main problem, how do I describe/name "magnitude of quality" versus "proximity to quality"?

The positive is always absolute, but the comparative and superlative describe different kinds of relative degree.

[Daniel]

Hmm... I'm not sure. I know there's a common distinction made between absolute adjectives (like "unique") and scalar adjectives (like "hot"). But between "hot" and "deaf" I'm not sure.

[freknu]

That's what I'm saying, scalar adjectives inflect for degree of magnitude, e.g. hotness, while absolute adjectives inflect for degree of proximity, e.g. deafness.

Or so it would seem in most cases.

[Daniel]

That makes some sense, but philosophically I'm not sure this really is different. Consider "cold". Absolute zero is a (hypothetical) limit to coldness, but in effect the adjective works just like "hot". Is there a theoretical limit there also? Possibly the speed of light such that a temperature would be so hot that it could not get any hotter without defying the laws of physics.

The practical issue here is whether the endpoint is within the normally relevant pragmatic range. But even then, there's some flexibility or possible coercion. Consider:

John was born deaf and has never heard anything and will never hear anything. Bill was in a car accident and has complete hearing loss but used to hear (and maybe even in the future could recover or get surgery to gain hearing again, even a little). In this case, we could say:

Bill is deaf, but John is really deaf.
Bill is deaf, but John is deafer (more deaf?).


There may be another way to look at this, also. If you take "deaf" to be primitively an absolute adjective, then you can assume coercion accounts for what's going on: deaf is absolute, either true (at the limit) or not true (whether or not the level of hearing is optimal, there's some hearing, not some deafness). Consider:
?*My deafness is worse than your deafness.
[As a description of ability to hear, not as a personal value or circumstantial evaluation.]

Then what happens is, through coercion, you make the adjective no longer absolute: "wow, he's really dead!" -- "I shot the bad guys 20 times in the video game-- they're more dead than the guys you shot!". In doing so, you displace the cases from that limit so that you can compare them. This really only happens when you're comparing. If you just have the normal positive form of the adjective, there isn't that kind of reading (at least not easily-- context could supply it, but that's what I'm suggesting in the first place as coercion).

[freknu]

I see.

Also, as a sidenote, with the achievement of negative temperatures "heat" is essentially limitless

[Daniel]

Below absolute zero? There is, I think, some actual (well, theoretical) limit on both ends.

[freknu]

Below absolute zero? There is, I think, some actual (well, theoretical) limit on both ends.

It goes +0 K (minimum entropy) / +∞ K / −∞ K / −0 K (maximum entropy)

[Daniel]

Interesting. Haven't seen anything on that.

[freknu]

Well, +0 K is the minimum state of entropy, absolute zero, entropy cannot decrease any further.

Adding energy to the system increases the entropy and consequently the temperature. For most (natural, I guess) systems there is no entropy saturation, meaning that the more energy you add to the system the greater the entropy — heat is indefinite, limitless, +∞ K.

However, (at least in laboratories) you can create systems with entropy saturation, meaning that once a certain point is reached, entropy becomes saturated, and adding further energy to the system no longer increases entropy. This means that adding energy to the system actually decreases entropy, the quantity of energy no longer available for work.

This saturation point, −0 K is technically the "hottest" (maximum entropy) possible state, and adding energy to this state will decrease entropy, and thus heat, towards −∞ K.

So even though it's a negative temperature, −0 K is actually hotter than +∞ K, even though +∞ K is indefinite.

It took a while for me to wrap my head around it, you really need to look at entropy rather than what is commonly thought of as heat/temperature — otherwise you'll just be left bewildered.

So, paradoxically, there is both no limit (+∞ K) and a limit (−0 K) to heat.

+0 K, adding energy increases entropy towards +∞ K
−0 K, adding energy decreases entropy towards −∞ K

Hopefully I explained that correctly Too bad we don't have any physicists on this board

[Daniel]

there is no entropy saturation, meaning that the more energy you add to the system the greater the entropy — heat is indefinite, limitless, +∞ K.

But... what about the speed of light? Heat is essentially movement, and there must be some maximum limit to that movement if there is a limit to movement in general at the speed of light. (Otherwise a really powerful oven could be a time machine.)

Otherwise, very interesting

[freknu]

there is no entropy saturation, meaning that the more energy you add to the system the greater the entropy — heat is indefinite, limitless, +∞ K.

But... what about the speed of light? Heat is essentially movement, and there must be some maximum limit to that movement if there is a limit to movement in general at the speed of light. (Otherwise a really powerful oven could be a time machine.)

Otherwise, very interesting

That's the thing, movement is only one component of heat, or rather, one way of looking at heat.

Adding energy to +0 K increases entropy, increasing the average kinetic energy of the atoms, and the range between the energy states of the atoms. So not only are the atoms as a whole "moving" faster, but the range between low (moving slower than the average) and high (moving faster than the average) energy states for each individual atom is also increasing — only at +0 K and −0 K are the atoms at a uniform energy state, anywhere else there is always a range of low to high.

Adding more and more energy will further increase the average kinetic energy and the range of energy states. Exactly how this relates to c and what limitations it implies I'm unsure about — besides, once you reach relativistic energies pretty everything gets really wonky! (But cool!)