Adjectives And Adverbs

We suspect that InterfacesShouldBeAdjectives, we also know that AspectOrientedProgramming systems can be tuned with adverbs. What else are these parts of speech good for? It turns out that FuzzyLogic systems tend to use adjectives as the names of fuzzy sets. Adverbs can be used to qualify the sets by operating on them. For instance, the set Tall can have its membership values squared to form Very Tall.

Could it be that InterfacesShouldBeAdjectives uses adjectives to describe static qualities, and more dynamic ones can be keyed to the values of instance variables?

Are there any other areas of active research out there that deal with AdjectivesAndAdverbs? What do they have in common?

NikBoyd? and I are working independently on what we call ComputationalRhetoric. I wrote for OOPSLA 92, it got turned into a poster session and abridged in the Addendum (Using Natural Language as a Metaphoric Base for Object-Oriented Modeling and Programming). I don't have a scanner or the original files, so its not on my web site (yet). Topic was, "if objects are nouns and verbs, where are the adjectives and adverbs?" Very nice starting point. Try it. you get dynamic reclassification, role modeling, all sorts of interesting things out of it. NikBoyd? just wrote a paper called On Computational Rhetoric on a web page (where?) so you can see where he has gone with the topic. -- AlistairCockburn

KenIverson's J language (JayLanguage) borrows heavily from the parts of speech vocabulary, including nouns, pronouns, verbs, ProVerb-s, conjunctions, adverbs, and even gerunds. (And the terms "fork" and "train", to describe the evaluation of successive verbs.) -- JimRussell

[SethGordon's discussion of nouns and verbs moved to LanguageUsability]