Associative adjectives such as in electrical engineer differ from ascriptive adjectives like in red house: They are syntactically similar, yet they do not denote an intersective sense like ascriptive adjectives do. However, associative adjectives may (irregularly) denote ascriptive traits connected to the associated entity: The more semantically-similar two entities are, the more regular the traits are which are ascribed to them through association by a given adjective. This model of entities associated through family membership is analogous to a semantic network based on relative word similarities, in which families appear as clusters of relatively-similar entities.
QC 20180228