Preliminary Recommendations

Use

Adjectives can have attributive and predicative value: these are not encoded in corpus tagging practice, but they are clearly retrievable from the observation of category sequences in a tagged corpus.

However, these two different uses influence the agreement in Number if the adjective refers to more than one noun (Gender is assigned by the Gender of the nouns: if the coordinated nouns are masculine and feminine the adjective selects the value masculine):

Predicative use

-- Singular nouns with masculine and feminine gender: ``mio figlio e mia figlia sono studiosi'' (Gend: masc.; Numb: plur.).

Attributive use

-- Here, the agreement in gender is not very precise: with singular nouns which are very similar in meaning, the adjective can agree with the closest noun, i.e. it can be singular: ``un carattere e una condotta onesta''.