ADJECTIVAL MODIFICATION

1

Overview (review)• Modify individuals, propositions, and events• Predicative use vs. attributive use• Predicative: classical approach: <e,t>• Not possible for attributive usage• Doesn’t work for: #Al is former. ✓Al is a former politician.• Gradability

• Unmarked positive• Comparative• Equative• Superlative

• Vagueness, context-dependence

Various classes (review)• Intersective• Subsective• Non-predicational

• Privatives: AN never entails N• This is a fake gun. never entails This is a gun. • Partee denies privatives exist: “Is that gun real or fake?”

• Intensionality and non-predicative adjectives

• Notice the type specifications on the lambdas; s is the type representing world-time pairs (aka situations, circumstances)

Pushing an intensional analysis to the limits• Allows us to use all the devices from the last textbook

• Context, instants, worlds

• Some putatively non-predicative adjectives have an intersective flavor

• Attributive vs. predicative: one approach is to consider each variant of an adjective separate lexical items

• Or, again, type-coercion (this time ATT for ‘attributive’) to the rescue!

Gradation

• Not all adjectives allow all types of gradation.• Other categories support gradation to some degree: adverbs, verbs,

quantificational determiners, nouns, auxiliaries

Approach 1: Degree variables• Add a new type d for degrees into the model. Add to the model an ordering

<D,≥>, a set of ordered pairs, called a scale.• Gradable adjectives: <d,<e,t>>

• Gradable and non-gradable adjectives: <e,t>• Only gradable adjectives are context-sensitive• Introduce a parameter that shifts • List of delineations, one for each scalar adjective:

Approach 2: Context-sensitive predicates

Vagueness• Lack of sharp boundaries: what’s heavy? rich? ugly? scary? happy?• Tolerance: we don’t apply sharp boundaries (truck=heavy, ?truck-1oz.?)• Sorites paradox• Borderline cases• Context dependence

• Statistical: derived from experience, exemplars• Conversational goals, agendas: context-sensitive

Approaches to vagueness• Epistemic: deny it’s part of the meaning: it’s all supplied by context, absolute• Context-dependent: uncertainty, linguistic hook to pragmatics• Degree-based: fuzzy logic; no distinct boundaries, rather a sliding scale• Statistical/probabilistic: inference over unknown boundaries

More about scales• Each adjective has its own

• Sometimes they’re comparable even if they’re different.• Add a dimension to the scale; then we can compare dimensions.• One-dimensional: tall, heavy• Multi-dimensional: big, beautiful, clever

• Here you can explicitly refer to only one dimension when needed

• Otherwise: exhaustive set of dimensions:

Antonyms• Share a set of degrees and a dimension, but the ordering is reversed• One of the pair is marked (aka evaluative):

Boundedness and scales• Four types:

• Fully open: no min/max (ugly/beautiful)• Fully closed: has min/max (empty/full)• Lower closed: has min, no max (straight/bent)• Upper closed: has max, no min (impure/pure)

• Linguistic phenomena• Adjectives that support maxima (maximum-standard):

• In the positive, associate with the maximum point• Can be modified by: completely, perfectly, etc. and reinforces the maximum point• Not very vague

• Adjectives without limits: vague, lack of endpoints (relative-standard)• Others: one limit, other defined in terms of deviation (however small) from the other

More linguistic phenomena• Comparative: relate the measures of two objects along a scale (or different ones)

• Fred is more hungry than he is ugly.• Comparative/superlative complement: evidence for a gap: (Bresnan 1975)

• He’s sadder than everybody else is _.*He’s sadder than everybody else’s.

• Usually considered as an instance of ellipsis• Equative: usually implies ≥

Sam is as tall as Bill (is tall).

Degree-variable approach (von Stechow 1984)• Add a degree variable to the model: <d,<e,t>>

• Define an operator max that returns the greatest member from a set of degrees

• Morpheme –er/–est: function that takes two degree sets and compares their maxima

Reading it off the syntax• Use an Op (i.e. an operator) in the syntax for the degree• Raise the construction at LF

Hey, that means we can have scope ambiguity! • Interaction with quantifiers; intended meaning:

• Interaction with modality:• Two readings: must be exactly 5′ (dispreferred), or must be ≥ 5′ (preferred)• Need possible/accessible worlds; “have to” means ◻

Prior approaches to comparison• Cresswell 1976:

degree variable

• Seuren 1984:extent variable

• Klein 1980:extent variable

just a presumption

just a presumption

Larson’s extent variable approach 1988• Lambda formulae

Difference variable approaches• Hellan 1981

• Bierwisch 1988:norm/variance

A recent comprehensive approach to superlatives• Leverage, in terms of semantics, the following paraphrase set:

John is the tallest boy.John the tallest of all the boys.John is taller than all of the boys.

• So far so good, but: we need to exclude J from the set. John is taller than all of the other boys.• Build in the notion of definiteness, which is explicit in the syn/sem.

Full derivation