Privative adjective

In linguistics, a privative adjective is an adjective which seems to exclude members of the extension of the noun which it modifies. For instance, "fake" is privative since a "fake nose" is not an actual nose. Other examples in English include "pretend", "fictitious", and "artificial". The defining feature of privative adjectives is shown below in set theoretic notation.^[1][2]

1. An adjective ${\displaystyle {\text{Adj}}}$ is privative if for any noun ${\displaystyle {\text{N}}}$, we have that ${\displaystyle [\![{\text{Adj N}}]\!]\cap [\![{\text{N}}]\!]=\emptyset }$.

Privative adjectives are non-

• Adjective
• Grammatical modifier
• Intersective modifier
• Subsective modifier

References