Gradable adjectives, axes and "signedness"

Another thing I've been meaning to write about for a while is how Vetela treats gradable adjectives^[0] - specifically, the way words are mapped onto different areas of an adjective's 'axis'.

First of all, in most languages, gradable adjectives often come in sets of at least two: large/small, hot/cold, etc.  For many everyday terms, Vetela does this too.  However, it also sometimes uses one word per "axis of meaning", with different degrees being expressed by prefixes.  For example:

Root	Adjectival
	Low degree	High degree	Extreme degree
teka "speed"	anteki "slow"	enteki "fast"	senteki "very fast"
kavua "mass"	ankavui "light"	enkavui "heavy"	senkavui "very heavy"

For adjectives of this type, the prefixless root merely states the presence of the property described by the axis, without making any comment about degree.  Or, to put that more clearly: describing an object as teki just means that it has a speed, be that fast or slow.  Similarly, putting it in the negative (tekúvi) doesn't mean that the object is "not fast" and therefore slow - for something to be described as tekúvi, it would have to have zero speed (or be something incapable of speed, such as an abstract concept).

The next thing to note is that there is a distinction between two classes of adjective:

• those whose axis of meaning ranges from "high negative degree" to "high positive degree", with an identifiable zero point in between (e.g. sad/happy); and
• those whose axis ranges from "zero" through "low degree" to "high degree" (e.g. small/large).

Since I'm a comp sci geek, I like to refer to these as "signed" and "unsigned" respectively. :)  The examples above were all unsigned; signed adjectives behave slightly differently:

    lesta: contentedness
    laulesti: sad
    kaslesti: neutral; neither happy nor sad
    leilesti: happy

The prefixes of degree (including an- and en- above) can still be added to the lau-/lei- forms:

    anlaulesti: slightly sad
    enleilesti: quite happy
    senleilesti: very happy

Again, an unprefixed root strictly speaking should be used only to refer to the property, making no comment about either degree or sign.  However, this can be unwieldy so the prefixes are commonly omitted in the informal language, with high-degree or positive-sign being assumed.

[0] Officially, there is no such word class as "adjectives", since Vetela has one main word class, all members of which can fulfil the same range of syntactic roles.  Calling them adjectives is convenient for the purposes of readability in this post, though :)