Similarities and Differences among Semantic Behaviors of 
Japanese Adnominal Constituents 
Kyoko Kanzaki and Qing Ma and Hitoshi Isahara 
Communications Research Laboratory 
588-2, Iwaoka, Iwaoka-cho, Nishi-ku, Kobe, 651-2492, Japan 
{kanzakilqma\[isahara} @crl.go.jp 
Abstract 
This paper treats the classification of the se- 
mantic functions performed by adnominal con- 
stituents in Japanese, where many parts of 
speech act as adnominal constituents. In order 
to establish a formal treatment of the semantic 
roles, the similarities and differences among ad- 
nominal constituents, i.e. adjectives and "noun 
+ NO (in English "of + noun")" structures, 
which have a broad range of semantic func- 
tions, are discussed. This paper also proposes 
an objective method of classifying these con- 
structs using a large amount of linguistic data. 
The feasibility of this was verified with a self- 
organizing semantic map based on a neural net- 
work model. 
1 Introduction 
Pustejovsky (Pustejovsky, 1995) proposed the 
theory of a generative lexicon as a framework by 
which meanings of words are expressed in one 
unified representation. This kind ofgenerativity 
would be very useful for NLP, especially if it is 
applicable to the complex semantic structures 
represented by various modification relations. 
In our previous research on adjectives (Isahara 
and Kanzaki, 1999) we used Pustejovsky's the- 
ory to classify adjectives in Japanese. In this pa- 
per we take the first steps in a similar classifica- 
tion of the Japanese "noun + NO" construction. 
Bouillon (Bouillon, 1996) applied this theory 
to the adnominal constituent of mental states. 
Saint-Dizier (Saint-Dizier, 1998) discussed ad- 
jectives in French. 
Isahara and Kanzaki (Isahara and Kanzaki, 
1999) treated a much wider range of phenom- 
ena of adnominal constituents. They classified 
the semantic roles of adnominal constituents 
in .Japanese. where many parts of speech act 
as adnominal constituents, and discussed a for- 
mal treatment of their semantic roles. In their 
research, adnominal constituents, mainly ad- 
jectives which function as adverbials, are dis- 
cussed. The present paper describes the sim- 
ilarities and differences among adnominal con- 
stituents, i.e. adjectives and "noun + NO t (in 
English "of + noun")" structures which have 
a broad range of semantic functions. This pa- 
per proposes an objective method for classifying 
these structures using a large amount of linguis- 
tic data. The feasibility of this was verified with 
a self-organizing semantic map based on a neu- 
ral network model. 
In section 2, we explain the semantic func- 
tions performed by "noun + NO." In section 
3, we discuss how we can semi-automatically 
obtain and classify examples of adjectives and 
"noun + NO" structures which have similar se- 
mantic functions. In section 4, we introduce a 
self-organizing semantic map to verify the result 
of this classification. In section 5, we discuss 
similarities and differences between adjectives 
and "noun + NO" structures. 
2 The Diversity of Semantic 
Relations between "noun -t- NO" 
and their Head Nouns 
Among Japanese adnominal constituents, " 
noun + NO" represents a wider range of seman- 
tic relations than other adnominal constituents. 
Therefore, "noun + NO" does not always be- 
have like the other adnominal constituents. In 
previous work, some researchers have analyzed 
semantic relations between the noun in the 
"noun + NO" structure and its head noun (Shi- 
mazu et al., 1986). Here, we show several ex- 
amples that demonstrate the diversity of the se- 
l "NO" is a Japanese postpositiona| which can repre- 
sent a wide range of semantic relations. It is similar to 
"of" in English. 
59 
mantic relation between "noun + NO" struc- 
tures and their head nouns shown in their re- 
search. 
DENWA NO SECCHI 
DENSHA NO TUUKIN 
ASHITA NO DEITO 
BILU NO MAE 
KODOMO NO NAMAE 
BAKUHATSU NO GEN'IN 
KAISHI NO JIKOKU 
HEYA NO BANGOU 
KANOJO NO NOUTO 
BENGOSHI NO SMITH SAN 
installation of 
the telephone 
commuting by 
train 
a date for 
tomorrow 
in front of 
the building 
the name of 
the child 
the cause of 
the explosion 
the starting time 
the number of 
the room 
her note 
Mr. Smith, 
the lawyer 
These semantic relations between "noun + 
NO" structures and their head nouns are dif- 
ferent than those between other adnominal con- 
stituents, e.g. adjectives and their head nouns. 
However, some "noun + NO" behavior is sim- 
ilar to the behavior of adjectives and nominal 
adjectivals. In these cases "noun + NO" seems 
not to differ semantically from adjectives and 
nominal adjectivals. Let us consider the English 
examples: 
financial world / world of finance ("ZAIKAI") 
industrial center / center of industry 
("SANGYOU NO CHUUSHIN") 
In this case "noun + NO" need not be dis- 
tinguished from an adjective with respect to se- 
mantic behavior. However, in the following ex- 
amples it is necessary to distinguish them from 
one another. 
global center / center of tile globe 
("SEKAI NO CHUUSHIN 
/ CHIKYUU NO CHUUSHIN") 
We do not have a discrimination criteria that 
automatically recognizes whether a "noun + 
NO" structure is similar in its semantic behav- 
ior to that of adjectives or not. We have at- 
tempted to gather, semi-automatically, nolms in 
the "n(mn + NO" structure which behave like 
adjectives. 
3 The Exploration of the Similarities 
of Semantic Functions of "noun + 
NO" Structures and Adjectives. 
(The Method for this Research) 
3.1 The Basic Concept 
There is one case in which the meanings of ad- 
nominal constituents are semantically similar 
to the features of the referents of their head 
nouns, e.g. adnominal constituents represent 
the concrete contents of their head nouns. Let 
us consider the Japanese phrase "KANASHII 
KIMOCHI (sad feeling)" and "YOROKOBI NO 
KIMOCHI (feeling of delight)" as examples. 
KANASHII KIMOCHI 
adjective noun 
(sad) (feeling) 
sad feeling 
YOROKOBI NO KIMOCHI 
noun postp, noun 
(delight) (of) (feeling) 
feeling of delight 
NB: The English gloss of the "noun + NO" 
examples should be read from right to left. 
One meaning of "KIMOCHI (feeling)" repre- 
sents the semantic element <mental state>. In 
the above examples, the adjective, "KANASHII 
(sad)", and "noun + NO", "YOROKOBI NO 
(of delight)", represent the concrete contents 
of their head noun "KIMOCHI (feeling)", i.e. 
they also represent the mental state: "feeling". 
Therefore, even though they belong to different 
parts of speech (adjective/noun), they must be 
classified in the same semantic category since 
both carry the same meaning. Neither the ad- 
jective, "KANASHII (sad)", nor the "noun + 
NO", "YOROKOBI NO (of delight)", can ap- 
pear in predicative position without changing 
their meaning. 
However, if adnominal constituents do not 
share the same semantic concept as their head 
noun, they cannot represent the contents of 
head nouns. The examples below demonstrate 
this. 
KANASHII KIMOCHI 
adje(:tive noun 
(sad) (feeling) 
JOHN NO KIMOCHI 
noun postp, noun 
(John) (of) (feeling) 
John's feeling 
60 
In the above examples, the noun in "noun + 
NO", "JOHN", does not include the concept, 
<mental state>, so it cannot represent the con- 
tent of "KIMOCHI (feeling)." The adjective, 
"KANASHII (sad)", and the noun in the "noun 
+ NO", "JOHN" do not embody the same con- 
cept and have a different semantic relation with 
their head noun. We cannot find the seman- 
tic similarities between "KANASHII (sad)" and 
"JOHN" that we could between "YOROKOBI 
NO (of delight)" and "KANASHII (sad)." We 
focus on the phenomena where adnominal con- 
stituents represent the concrete contents of their 
head nouns. This makes it possible to identify 
adjectives and "noun + NO" structures which 
are similar in semantic behavior to the referents 
of their head nouns. These expressions are ex- 
tracted semi-automatically from large corpora. 
3.2 How to Extract the Necessary 
Information 
When we collect words which have some sim- 
ilarities, it is difficult to select the semantic 
axis for classification by making use of only 
the co-occurring words. In collecting similar 
words, some previous research took not only co- 
occurring words but also the context of these 
words into account (Grefenstette, 1994). One 
of the important points of our analysis is the 
introduction of the distinct semantic elements 
that both "noun + NO" structures and adjecti- 
vals (adjectives and nominals) have in common 
with their head nouns. We wanted to ascertain 
the similarities between "noun + NO" and other 
adnominal constituents based on these common 
semantic elements. For this reason, we used 
the semantic relations, in which adnominal con- 
stituents represent the concrete content of their 
head nouns, as a key to classification. We au- 
tomatically 2 extracted these relations from one 
year of newspaper articles from Mainichi Shim- 
bun (1994), 100 novels from Shincho publishers 
and 100 books covering a variety of topics. We 
used the following procedure to extract the nec- 
essary information. 
Step 1) Extract from the corpora, all nouns 
which are preceded by the Japanese expression 
"TOIU" which is something like "that" or "of." 
"TOIU + noun (noun that/of ...)" is a typical 
,Japanese expression which introduces some in- 
2Only Step 3) is done manually. 
formation about the referent of the noun, such 
as apposition. Therefore, nouns found in this 
pattern may have their content elucidated by 
means of their modifiers. 
Step 2) Extract from the corpora, all "noun 
+ NO" structures, adjectives and nominal ad- 
jectivals which modify the nouns extracted in 
step 1. 
NB, the relationships between adnominal 
constituents and their modified nouns extracted 
here include not only representations of the con- 
tents of the noun, but also other various rela- 
tions. 
Step 3) Extract "noun + NO" structures, ad- 
jectives and nominal adjectivals which represent 
the contents of the referents of the modified 
nouns. Step 3 is done manually. 
Step 4) In order to find the distribution of 
their semantic categories and analyze the se- 
mantic similarities between "noun + NO" and 
other adnominal constituents in each semantic 
category, we clustered the modified nouns auto- 
matically. This clustering was based on sets of 
similar adnominal constituents which represent 
the content of the referent of the modified noun. 
4 The Semantic Map of the 
Modified Nouns Constructed by 
the Self-Organizing System of the 
Neural Network Model 
We can gather similar modified nouns when we 
classify the modified nouns according to the 
similarities of the adnominal constituents, be- 
cause in our data both adnominal constituents 
and their modified nouns have the same se- 
mantic elements in common that we mentioned 
above. 
We attempted to construct the Semantic Map 
of the modified nouns gathered by the above- 
mentioned method by using the self-organizing 
system of the neural network model (Ma et al., 
2000). We suppose that both modified nouns 
and adnominal constituents have common se- 
rnantic elements when adnominal constituents 
represent the concrete content of their head 
nouns. If this is true, nouns with similar mean- 
ings are located near each other oil the semantic 
map, self-organized by the similarities of seman- 
tic elements among the adnominal constituents. 
The result of our experiment verified this sup- 
position (Figure I). The nouns with a similar 
61 
meaning are located near each other on the map 
and we could divide the distribution of the mod- 
ified nouns into seven categories (Figure 2). 
Each group, i.e. the "mental state" 
group, "state/ situation" group, "characteris- 
tics" group, "range/ area" group, "viewpoint/ 
standpoint" group, "aspect" group, and "oth- 
ers," represents a meaning held in common by 
nouns in the group. Mental state can be fur- 
ther divided into the state of emotion, mood 
and intention. As we analyze the adnominal 
constituents in each category of modified nouns, 
we can find the possibility of the co-occurrence 
of an adnominal constituent with a head noun. 
Table 1 shows examples of adjectives and nouns 
in "noun + NO" structures in each group. 
UT~A 
® 
Table 1: List of adjectives and "noun + NO" 
Structures 
<mental state: emotion> 
Adj: KANASHII (sad), URESHII 
(pleasurable) 
noun+no: KANASHIMI (sadness), 
YOROKOBI (delight) 
<state/situation> 
Adj: ISOGASHII (busy), 
MUTITUJONA (disorderly) 
noun+no: KURAYAMI (darkness), 
MUISHIKI (unconscious) 
<aspect> 
Adj: YUUMOUNA (brave), 
HIGEKITEKINA (tragic) 
noun+no: KONTON (chaos), TAIHAI 
(decadence) 
<characteristic> 
Adj: NONKINA (carefree), 
KISAKUNA (open-hearted) 
noun+no: IJIPPARI (stubbornness), 
GOUMANNA (arrogance) 
<range/area> 
Adj: JOUSHIKITEKINA (comnmnsense), 
KOUTEKINA (official) 
noun+no: GAKUMON (studies), GYOUMU 
(duty) 
<viewpoint/standpoint> 
Adj: KYOUIKUTEKINA (educational), 
SHOUGYOUTEKINA (economic) 
noun+no: KYOUIKU (education), EISEI 
(hygiene) 
Figure 1: Semantic Map 1 
Figure 2: Semantic Map 2 
In the mental state, state/situation, aspect 
and characteristics groups~ adjectives appear 
more frequently than "noun + NO" construc- 
tions. These are simple adjectives. Ill the 
range/area and viewpoint/standpoint groups, 
62 
"noun + NO" structures appear more fre- 
quently than simple adjectives. Nominal adjec- 
tivals derived from nouns plus the suffix "TEKI- 
na" appear often with these noun groups. Most 
nouns in the groups "mental state: emotion", 
"state/situation" and "characteristics", contain 
abstract nouns which represent emotions, situa- 
tions or characteristics. There are few concrete 
nouns. However, in the groups "range/area" 
and "viewpoint/standpoint', there are many 
concrete nouns which represent natural phe- 
nomena, organizations or professional domains 
and few abstract nouns. We can find differences 
among "noun + NO" structures, that is, there 
are adjectives which behave like nouns semanti- 
cally and there are nouns which behave seman- 
tically like adjectives. 
5 The semantic behavior of the 
"noun -t- NO" structure which is 
similar to that of adjectives 
5.1 Types of nouns in the "noun -'t- 
NO" structure 
As we mentioned in section 3, we extracted the 
"noun + NO" structures which have the same 
semantic element, along with similar adjectives, 
from large corpora. For example, 
KIKEN_NA JOUTAI 
(dangerous) (situation) 
dangerous situation 
In this case "dangerous" represents the state 
concretely. 
MIKETTEI NO JOUTAI 
(indecision) (of) (situation) 
a situation of indecision 
In this case, the "MIKETTEI NO (of in- 
decision)" also represents the state concretely. 
Here, both "KIKENN_NA (dangerous)" and 
"MIKETTEI NO (of indecision)" have tile same 
semantic element "state" in common. We find 
that a "situation" can be represented by both 
an adjective and the "noun + NO" structure. 
When "MIKETTEI NO (of indecision)" co- 
occurs with modified nouns other than "situa- 
tion", it mostly represents the semantic notion, 
e.g. "MIKETTEI NO MONDAI (a problem of 
indecision)", and so on. That is,"MIKETTEI 
NO (of indecision)," represents the situation of 
a problem. So we see that "MIKETTEI NO (of 
indecision)" is in itself like an adjective. 
On the other hand, "KUMORI NO (cloudi- 
ness)" behaves sometimes like an adjective and 
sometimes not. 
KUMORI NO JOUTAI 
(cloudiness) (of) (state) 
a state of cloudiness 
The semantic behavior of "KUMORI NO 
(of cloudiness)" is like the behavior of adjec- 
tives in that the cloudiness represents the state 
as "KIKEN_NA (dangerous)," however, "KU- 
MORI NO (of cloudiness)" does not always rep- 
resent the state of the referent of the modified 
noun though "MIKETTEI NO (of indecision)" 
always represents that. "KUMORI (cloudi- 
ness)" is a natural phenomenon which can be 
pointed to concretely. For example, 
KUMORI NO NISSU 
(cloudiness) (of) (amount) 
WA 4 GATU NI SITEWA IJOU DA. 
The amount of cloudiness is unusual for April. 
In this example, "KUMORI NO (of cloudi- 
ness)" modifies "NISSU (the amount)," and 
does not represent a state but the possessor of 
the amount. 
As the examples of "MIKETTEI NO (of 
indecision)" and "KUMORI NO (of cloudi- 
ness)" show, there are nouns which have the 
same properties as adjectives intrinsically (e.g. 
"MIKETTEI (indecision)"), and other nouns 
which intrinsically have different properties 
from adjectives (e.g. "KUMORI (cloudiness)"). 
So, it is important to consider the properties of 
the noun in "noun + NO" when we analyze the 
"noun + NO" which behaves semantically like 
an adjective. Such an analysis enables us to find 
the situation in which they act like adjectives. 
We classified nouns in "noun + NO" structures 
into three types based on what the nouns refer 
to. Nouns from the last category, 3), are similar 
to adjectives semantically. As adjectives do not 
represent concrete objects or verb-like notions, 
nouns from these categories only occasionally 
resemble adjectives. 
63 
Noun Categories: 
1) nouns which refer to concrete objects. (like 
rain, book, science, and so on) 
2) nominalizations (like decision, work, and so 
on) 
3) nouns which belong to neither 1) nor 2), 
e.g. abstract nouns and so on. 
As our corpora contain mainly newspaper ar- 
ticles, many compound nouns appear. Since the 
last word in a compound noun determines the 
properties of the whole word, we focus on the 
last word in classifying them. 
Table 2 contains examples of the noun cate- 
gories. "KOUGYOU TOSHI (industry city)" is 
an example of a compound noun where the last 
word "TOSHI (city)" determines the properties. 
Table 2: Some "noun + NO" constructions with 
"impression" 
1) nouns which refer to concrete objects 
KOUGYOU TOSHI, HINOKI 
(industry city) (cypress) 
2) nominalizations 
SOKUBAKU, KOUTEN 
(restriction) (improvement) 
3) nouns which belong to neither 1) nor 2) 
MUTONTYAKU, JAKUSHOU 
(carelessness) (weakness) 
In the following section, we analyze the sim- 
ilarities and differences of the semantic behav- 
ior of "noun + NO" structures and adjectives. 
Firstly, we describe the case in which the se- 
mantic behavior of "noun + NO" is similar to 
that of adjectives and then we mention the case 
in which the semantic behavior of "noun + NO" 
is different from that of adjectives. Secondly, we 
analyze several types of nouns in "noun + NO" 
which behave like adjectives, ewm though nouns 
in "noun + NO" are not intrinsically similar to 
adjectiw; types. 
5.2 The differences of semantic 
behavior between nouns in "noun 
-b NO" and adjectives 
For example, "KANASHII (sad)", "URESHII 
(pleasurable)", "ZANNEN_NA (regrettable)", 
"KANASHIMI NO (of sadness)", "YOROKOBI 
NO (of delight)" and so on, modify nouns 
such as "OMOI (thought)", "KANJI (emo- 
tion)" and so on. Using a set of adnomi- 
nal constituents, such as "KANASHII (sad)", 
"URESHII (pleasurable)", "ZANNEN..NA (re- 
grettable)", as keys for classification, we can 
classify the modified nouns, "OMOI (thought)", 
"KANJI (feeling)" and so on, into the same 
group. Then we can find a semantic relation- 
ship between these adnominal constituents and 
their head nouns, in this case, <emotion>. In 
the following, we describe the similar and dif- 
fering semantic behaviors of "noun ÷ NO" and 
other adjectives in the same semantic category. 
As we described in the previous section, we ex- 
tract sets of "noun + NO" structures and ad- 
jectives from data which was sorted semanti- 
cally. Words in each set represent the seman- 
tic substance of the similar nouns which they 
modify. Therefore, their semantic categories 
are similar. Examples of modified nouns of a 
similar semantic category and their modifiers 
which have a semantic category similar to that 
of the nouns are listed in Table 3. Included are 
some "noun ÷ NO" examples which though co- 
occurring with <mental state> nouns are not 
classified as such themselves. There are many 
adjectives and nominal adjectivals which can 
modify nouns in Table 3, such as "AWARENA 
(poor)", "IJIRASHII (moving)" and "HOKO- 
RASHII (triumphant)." Some "noun ÷ NO" 
structures are semantically similar to these ad- 
jectives since they represent the contents of the 
emotion, e.g. "FUKAI NO KAN (sensation of 
displeasure)" and "YOROKOBI NO KIMOCHI 
(feeling of delight)." Most nouns in these "noun 
+ NO" structures in Table 3 are classified into 
"mental activity by humans" by the "Word List 
Classified by Semantic Principles3. '' "Noun + 
NO" structures, which have this kind of seman- 
tic; category, are similar to adjectives and nom- 
inal adjectivals, as both represent the content 
of the human mind. We call this semantic cat- 
'~This list was compiled by The Natural Language Re- 
search Institute, Tokyo. 
64 
Table 3: The modified nouns and adjectives, 
nominal adjectivals, and "noun + NO" 
collected in the semantic category, 
<mental state> 
Modified nouns 
KANJI (feeling), KAN (sensation), 
OMOI (thought), KI (intention), 
NEN (inclination), KIMOCHI (mind), 
KIBUN (mood), KANJO (emotion), 
JO (passion) 
Adjectives and nominal adjectivals 
AWARE_NA (poor), IJIRASHII (moving), 
HOKORASHII (triumphant), 
KINODOKU_NA (unfortunate), 
SHIAWASE_NA (happy), 
ZANNEN_NA (disappointing), 
URESHII (pleasurable), ...and so on. 
"Nouns" in the "noun + NO" structure 
a) mental activity 
KANASHIMI (sadness), FUKAI (displeasure), 
SHITASHIMI (familiarity), 
ZOUO (abhorrence), GAMAN (endurance), 
KOUKAI (regret), YOROKOBI (joy), 
MANZOKU (satisfaction), 
RAKUTAN (disappointment), 
IGAI (unexpected), ...and so on. 
b) nominalizations 
HOSHIN (self-defense), 
CHIKUZAI (moneymaking), 
INTAI (retirement), HIHAN (criticism), 
HIYAKU (rapid progress), ...and so on 
egory created by these adnominal constituents 
and their modified nouns "Feeling." 
On the other hand, some adnominal rela- 
tionships concerning a mental state can only 
be represented by "noun + NO" structures, 
such as "HOSHIN NO KIMOCHI (desire of de- 
fending one's own interest)," "CHIKUZAI NO 
NEN (thought of moneymaking)" and "INTAI 
NO KIMOCHI (idea of retirement)." Event 
nouns are mainly used in these "noun + NO" 
structures. Adnominal modifying relations of 
"nominalization + NO + mental state_noun" 
structures represent an intentional mental state. 
This kind of intentional mental state cannot be 
expressed by adjectives. We call this semantic 
category "Intentional mental state." 
We discussed two types of semantic represen- 
tations above, i.e. Feeling and Intentional men- 
tal state. Feeling can be represented by adjec- 
tives and "noun + NO" structures. However, 
Intentional mental state can be represented 
only by "noun + NO" structures. From the 
standpoint of the characteristics of the modified 
nouns (they represent human mental states), 
these two mental activities (Feeling and Inten- 
tional mental state) are similar, even though 
there are .differences in whether the activity is 
intentional or not. However, from the stand- 
point of the selection of an adnominal relation- 
ship in the surface structure, whether the activ- 
ity has active intention or not will be the decid- 
ing factor for the selection between adjectives 
and "noun + NO" structures. 
5.3 The case where the semantic 
behavior of "noun + NO" 
structures is similar to that of 
adjectives 
Here we focus on nouns whose properties are 
unlike those of adjectives, i.e. the nouns which 
refer to concrete objects, verbal notions and so 
on. 
(1) In the case where "noun + NO" represents 
characteristics, there is some overlap be- 
tween the semantic behavior of adjectives 
and "noun + NO" structures. 
I) The case where the noun in "noun + NO" 
is a compound noun 
Let us compare "noun + NO" with adjective 
usage. 
MUKUCHI_NA INSHOU 
(reticent) (impression) 
GA TUYOI JOHN-SAN WA "" 
Jotm who makes a reticent impression "-" 
KOUGYOUTOSHI NO INSHOU 
(industry city) (of) (impression) 
GA TUYOI KAWASAKISHI WA... 
65 
KAWASAKI city which gives a strong im- 
pression of an industrial city 4 
b) Modified nouns which represent instances 
of the concrete nouns in compound nouns 
In the previous two examples, the differences 
between "noun + NO" and adjectives depend 
only on whether the nouns they modify rep- 
resent a person or a city where both head 
nouns have characteristics in common. How- 
ever, "KOUGYOUTOSHI (industry city)" does 
not always have the same semantic relation to 
the modified noun, as seen in the following ex- 
ample: 
KOUGYOUTOSHI NO YUKYUTI 
(industry city) (of) (vacant land) 
NI TYAKUMOKU. 
They noticed the vacant land 
in the industrial city. 
In this example, the semantic relation be- 
tween "KOUGYOUTOSHI NO (of industry 
city)" and "YUKYUTI (the vacant land)" indi- 
cate the relation of possession so that it is not a 
semantic relation that adjectives can represent. 
When the modified nouns are abstract nouns 
that represent the property ("INSHOU (impres- 
sion)" or "SEIKAKU (characteristics)" etc.), or 
instances of the concrete nouns in compound 
nouns ("KAWASAKI SHI (KAWASAKI city)"), 
the semantic function of compound nouns in 
"noun + NO" constructions represent the char- 
acteristics of the referent of the modified nouns 
as adjectives do. 
a) Modified nouns which are abstract nouns 
that represent a property. 
KOUGYOUTOSHI NO IMEJI 
(industry city) (of) (image) 
GA OOKII. 
The image of an industrial city is strong. 
KOUKYUUHIN NO INSHOU 
(high quality item) (of) (impression) 
GA TUYOI SHANERU 
(with) CHANNEL the impression of 
a high-quality item is strong. 
4Note that some words which are nouns in Japanese 
(e.g. industry, high quality)must be translated as adjec- 
tiw~ in English (e.g. industrial, high-quality) 
<city-SUZUKA-SHI> 
KOUGYOUTOSHI NO SUZUKA SHI 
(industry city) (of) (SUZUKA city) 
SUZUKA city which is an industrial city 
<item-diamonds> 
KOUKYUUHIN NO DAIYA 
(high quality item) (of) (diamond) 
Diamonds are a high-quality item 
<company-IBM> 
YURYOUGAISHA NO 
(excellent company) (of) 
IBM is an excellent company 
IBM 
When the modified noun is an instance 
of the last word of the modifying com- 
pound noun, the semantic function of the 
whole compound noun is similar to that 
of adjectives because, in this type of com- 
pound, we focus on the adjectival semantic 
element. For example, "KOUGYOU (indus- 
try)" in "KOUGYOUTOSHI (industry city)", 
"KOUKYUU (high-quality)" in "KOUKYU- 
UHIN (high quality item)", and "YUURYOU 
(excellent)" in "YUURYOUGAISHA (excellent 
company)" are adjectival. 
II) the nouns that refer to the concrete object 
in "noun + NO" 
Originally the nouns that refer to a concrete 
object or event do not have the same meaning as 
adjectives, however, they have similar semantic 
behavior to that of adjectives in the following 
case. 
KARE WA OTONASHII KIHUU 
(mild) (disposition) 
NO MOTINUSHI DA. 
He has a mild disposition. 
The "mild" represents the characteristic (dis- 
position). In the following examples the "noun 
+ NO" also indicate the characteristics of some- 
thing. 
66 
KODOMOTACHI WA ... MASSUGU 
NOBIRU 
HINOKI 
(HINOKI-tree) 
These children 
NO INSHOU 
(of) (impression) 
GA ARIMASHITA. 
give the impression of a 
HINOKI-tree which grows straight. 
KAGAKUGAISHA TOIU KOTODE IPPAN 
NO HITO NIWA 
KANKYOUOSEN NO INSHOU 
(environment pollution) (of) (impression) 
impression of environmental pollution 
GA TUYOKATTA. 
Ordinary people have a strong impression of 
environmental pollution from the chemical 
company. 
The impression the children make is of a 
"HINOKI (HINOKI-tree)" and the impression 
the chemical company makes is of "KANKY- 
OUOSEN (environmental pollution)". These 
"noun + NO'structures represent the charac- 
teristics of children and a company in same 
manner that the adjective "mild" indicates his 
characteristic. In these examples, nouns in 
"noun + NO" represent objects and events and 
so on, i.e. "HINOKI-tree" and "environmental 
pollution" these nouns ordinarily do not behave 
like adjectives. That is, the adjective "mild" 
can represent a characteristic directly, however, 
these nouns in "noun + NO" cannot represent 
the characteristics of something directly. We 
cannot say "that children are HINOKI-tree" 
and "the company is the environmental pollu- 
tion" while we can say "He is mild." That is, in 
this case, "noun + NO" cannot appear in the 
predicative position with this meaning. When 
we show the characteristics of something by us- 
ing nouns that refer to concrete objects and 
events, we need to specify the modified nouns 
which indicate the characteristics like "impres- 
sion, .... disposition" and so on. 
(2) "Noun + NO" can represent quantification. 
Some adjectives (:an also represent quantifi- 
cation. 
NIHON NO.HASHIMOTO SHUSHOU NO 
TEIAN WA AIKAWARAZU 
67 
TYUUSHOUTEKI_NA IKI 
(abstract) (level) 
NI TODOMATTA. 
The suggestion of the Japanese prime minis- 
ter, Hashimoto, was still in an abstract state. 
HUSAINO HIRITU GA KAKEI NI TOTTE 
KIKEN_NA IKI NI TASSHITEIRU. 
(dangerous) (level) 
The rate of debt has reached a dangerous 
level for the household budget. 
The suggestion of the Japanese prime min- 
ister is at an "abstract" level on the "concrete- 
abstract" scale and the rate of debt is at a "dan- 
gerous" level on the "safety-dangerous" scale. 
The level of concreteness and safety is repre- 
sented by adjectives. On the other hand, the 
nouns that refer to concrete objects and verbal 
notions also represent a level by inference from 
the context. We can infer the scale from the 
contextual situation. For example, 
KOUNIN KOUHO WA 
UWASA NO DANKAI 
(rumor) (of) (stage) 
the stage of rumor 
DA GA BORUGA SHI 
Though it is completely at the stage of ru- 
mor, the candidate for the succession is Mr. 
Borgar ... 
SHUSHOU GAWA WA "" 
(the prime minister and his staff) 
ENZETU NO IKI 
(speech) (of) (level) 
WO KOERARENAKATTA. 
Though the prime minister and his staff said 
"we will specify the guidelines of the govern- 
ment proposal during the election", after all 
it was still at the level of speech. 
GIJUTUTEKINIWA 
KANSEI NO IKI 
(completeness) (of) (level) 
NI TASSHITEITA. 
It reached a level of completeness, technically. 
In the above case, we do not have a seman- 
tic element of actual "talk" in the "rumor" 
or "speech" meaning nor a semantic element 
"event" in the "completeness" meaning, but we 
have the level of "rumor" on the "truth-rumor" 
scale, the level of "speech" on the "statement- 
speech" scale and the level of "completeness" on 
the "incompleteness-completeness" scale. The 
nouns that refer to concrete objects and verbal 
actions are similar to adjectives when they rep- 
resent a level in context. 
6 Conclusion 
In this paper, we discussed the similarities 
and differences among adnominal constituents, 
i.e. adjectives and "noun + NO" structures 
which have a broad range of semantic functions. 
Nouns and adjectives differ in part of speech, 
but they sometimes have similarities when used 
adnominally. In such a case, we need not dis- 
tinguish them from each other semantically. We 
investigated explicit criteria to detect similari- 
ties and differences between nouns and adjec- 
tives in adnominal usage. This research was ver- 
ified by using large corpora and a self-organizing 
mapping system based on the neural network 
model. In future work, we will attempt to sys- 
tematically classify words used adnominally ac- 
cording to the semantic behavior of adnominal 
constituents following the theoretical insights of 
Pustejovsky. 
Acknowledgment 
We would like to thank Catherine Macleod of 
New York University and Kiyotaka Uchimoto 
of the Communications Research Laboratory for 
their invaluable help in writing this paper. 

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