Abstract
There is a range of semantic relationship between attributive adjectives and nouns. The semantic relationship between them in many cases is not amenable to an account in terms of conjunction. On the strength of the insights derived from previous studies the present paper attempts to account for such semantic relationships which show the validity of intensionalist approach rather than extensionalist approach. An attributive adjective fulfills the role of triggering an aspect or aspects of the head noun. The theory of generative lexicon proposed by Pustejovsky (1995a) makes possible the establishment of a richer semantic content of noun phrases, which can be used to capture the manifold semantic relationship between attributive adjectives and nouns. In some cases it is not the superficial semantic manifestation, but the underlyhing event structure behind the noun phrase, that attributive adjectives specify. That is, the attributive adjective selects the attributes of the event structure associated with the noun phrase in the process of co-composition. We can attain a great measure of generality by exploiting the richer lexicon of noun phrases and provide a satisfactory account to explain away some seeming idiosyncrasies. The paper attempts a fine-grained and in-depth analysis of the intriguing semantic behavior of attributive adjectives in Mandarin in the hope that it will have some import for universal grammar, linguistic typology, cognitive linguistics, contrastive analysis and translation.