subsective

subsective (comparative more subsective, superlative most subsective)

1. (linguistics) Having the property that when used to modify a noun, it denotes a subset of the all possible denotations of the noun, but does not modify any other meanings of the entity that the noun denotes. For example "habitual" in the phrase "habitual liar" is subsective. If the liar is also a woman, the fact that she is a habitual liar does not imply that she is a "habitual woman".
   • 2002, MIT Working Papers in Linguistics - Volumes 42-43, page 84:

     But, as a matter of a fact, this syllogism failure can be a problem for any analysis that deals with languages that allow subsective predicates to occur as predicates inside RCs.

   • 2003, University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers, page 108:

     Since the nouns were controlled for both length and frequency, one might want to interpret this finding as indicative that adjective-noun phrases are harder to understand when there is no subsective bias.

   • 2005, N. Abdullah, R.A. Frost, “Adjectives: A Uniform Semantic Approach”, in Advances in Artificial Intelligence, →ISBN, page 332:

     reaches the conclusion that privative adjectives are subsective based on work done by other researchers (e.g., see, ) on the "Noun Phrase-split phenomena" in Polish, which reveals the absence of the privative adjective class in Polish.

   • 2010, Umberto Ansaldo, Jan Don, Roland Pfau, Parts of Speech: Empirical and theoretical advances, →ISBN, page 227:

     It is then claimed that a flexible word class is not a merger of some rigid word classes, but constitutes a proper category in its own right in that category membership can be described in terms of subsective and intersective gradience.

• intersective