A central goal of typological research is to characterize linguistic features in terms of both their functional role and their fit to social and cognitive systems. One long-standing puzzle concerns why certain languages employ grammatical gender. In an information theoretic analysis of German noun classification, Dye, Milin, Futrell, and Ramscar enumerated a number of important processing advantages gender confers. Yet this raises a further puzzle: If gender systems are so beneficial to processing, what does this mean for languages that make (...) do without them? Here, we compare the communicative function of gender marking in German to that of prenominal adjectives in English, finding that despite their differences, both systems act to efficiently smooth information over discourse, making nouns more equally predictable in context. We examine why evolutionary pressures may favor one system over another and discuss the implications for compositional accounts of meaning and Gricean principles of communication. (shrink)

In the formation of extended noun phrases, expressions are used that describe some dimension. Weight is described by each of the prenominal expressions in heavy rock, too much ballast, 2 lb rock, 2 lbs of rocks. The central claim of this paper is that the position of these types of expressions within the noun phrase limits the kinds of dimensions they may describe. The limitations have to do with whether or not the dimension tracks relevant part-whole relations. An analogy (...) is made between these constraints and the well-known constraints on thematic relations that are incurred by the position of a noun phrase in a clause. A proposal is made about the meanings of expressions like too much and 2 pounds which explains their common cross-categorial distribution and this informs the analysis of their use in noun phrases. A position is taken on the meaning of the count mass distinction which, in conjunction with the hypothesis about dimensions, explains asymmetries in the distribution of prenominal adjectives with count and mass nouns. (shrink)

Superlative adjectives accompanied by certain modal adjectives like possible (e.g. John bought the largest possible present) are ambiguous between a reading where possible is a regular noun modifier and a reading paraphrasable as ‘as Adj as possible’, called ‘modal superlative reading’. Three interesting restrictions have been observed in the literature. First, possible and some other adjectives ending in -able, but not potential and probable, support the latter reading. Second, when the modal adjective appears postnominally, only the modal (...) superlative reading is available. Third, prenominal possible needs to be in a local configuration to -est in order for the modal superlative reading to arise. Using LF structures independently motivated for degree constructions, the present paper develops a compositional semantic analysis of the modal superlative reading, makes correct new predictions concerning this reading, and—by reconciling previous, opposed syntactic analyses—allows us to derive the three empirical restrictions above. The key innovations are: (i) the previously proposed constituent [possible ▲ellipsis] is interpreted as an amount relative clause, and (ii) this constituent is treated as overtly expressing the comparison class argument of -est. (shrink)

A pragmatic account of referential communication is developed which presents an alternative to traditional Gricean accounts by focusing on cooperativeness and efficiency, rather than informativity. The results of four language‐production experiments support the view that speakers can be cooperative when producing redundant adjectives, doing so more often when color modification could facilitate the listener's search for the referent in the visual display (Experiment 1a). By contrast, when the listener knew which shape was the target, speakers did not produce redundant (...) color adjectives (Experiment 1b). English speakers used redundant color adjectives more often than Spanish speakers, suggesting that speakers are sensitive to the differential efficiency of prenominal and postnominal modification (Experiment 2). Speakers were also cooperative when using redundant size adjectives (Experiment 3). Overall, these results show how discriminability affects a speaker's choice of referential expression above and beyond considerations of informativity, supporting the view that redundant speakers can be cooperative. (shrink)

(4) Jean apprécie ce livre-là. (‘Jean appreciates ce book-there’) (5) Jean apprécie ce livre-ci. (‘Jean appreciates ce book-here’) in a way that recalls in part non-standard English: (6) John is reading that there book. (7) John is reading this here book. with (6) akin to (4) and with (7) akin to (5). The difference in word order, whereby English has there/here prenominal in (6)/(7) and French has - là/-ci postnominal in (4)/(5), was analyzed by Bernstein (1997) in terms of (...) a movement operation that in French moves the noun to the left of -là/-ci, starting from an English-like order, in a way that recalls the difference between French and English adjective position, as in Cinque (2005; to appear). English allows that and this to occur without any visible noun present, as in. (shrink)

Multidimensional adjectives are ubiquitous in natural language. An adjective F is multidimensional just in case whether F applies to an object or pair of objects depends on how those objects stand with respect to multiple underlying dimensions of F-ness. Developing a semantics for multidimensional adjectives requires us to address the problem of dimensional aggregation: how do the application conditions of an adjective F in its positive and comparative forms depend on its underlying dimensions? Here we develop a semantics (...) for multidimensional adjectives that incorporates aggregation functions. We then explore an analogy between dimensional aggregation and preference aggregation, bringing results from social choice theory to bear on the number and kind of aggregation functions that are admissible in a context. These results suggest that, for any given adjective, there will often be multiple aggregation functions admissible, meaning that multidimensional comparatives are often vague. (shrink)

Among semanticists and philosophers of language, there has been a recent outburst of interest in predicates such as delicious, called predicates of personal taste (PPTs, e.g. Lasersohn 2005). Somewhat surprisingly, the question of whether or how we can distinguish aesthetic predicates from PPTs has hardly been addressed at all in this recent work. It is precisely this question that we address. We investigate linguistic criteria that we argue can be used to delineate the class of specifically aesthetic adjectives. We (...) show that there are, in fact, good motivations for keeping PPTs and aesthetic predicates apart: the semantic structure of the former, but not the latter, entails an experiencer. There are many adjectives whose semantic structure arguably also entails an experiencer, yet which are readily used in expressing aesthetic judgments. Adjectives such as provocative or moving are a case in point, since as adjectives they arguably maintain the experiencer argument from the verb they are derived from. Nevertheless, when we describe, say, a sculpture as provocative, or a theater performance as moving, we clearly make aesthetic judgments. The difficult question, then, is to articulate the relationship between an aesthetic predicate (of which beautiful and ugly are paradigms) and other predicates that just happen to be used in making an aesthetic judgment. Tightly related to this point is the more general question of the relationship between an evaluative predicate and a predicate that occurs in an evaluative judgment. One of our aims is to make some progress in addressing these questions. (shrink)

Are color adjectives ("red", "green", etc.) relative adjectives or absolute adjectives? Existing theories of the meaning of color adjectives attempt to answer that question using informal ("armchair") judgments. The informal judgments of theorists conflict: it has been proposed that color adjectives are absolute with standards anchored at the minimum degree on the scale, that they are absolute but have near-midpoint standards, and that they are relative. In this paper we report two experiments, one based on (...) entailment patterns and one based on presupposition accommodation, that investigate the meaning of scalar adjectives. We find evidence confirming the existence of subgroups of the population who operate with different standards for color adjectives. The evidence of interpersonal variation in where standards are located on the relevant scale and how those standards can be adjusted indicates that the existing theories of the meaning of color adjectives are at best only partially correct. We also find evidence that paradigmatic relative adjectives ("tall", "wide") behave in ways that are not predicted by the standard theory of scalar adjectives. We discuss several different possible explanations for this unexpected behavior. We conclude by discussing the relevance of our findings for philosophical debates about the nature and extent of semantically encoded context sensitivity in which color adjectives have played a key role. (shrink)

The goal of this short paper is to show that esthetic adjectives—exemplified by “beautiful” and “elegant”—do not pattern stably on a range of linguistic diagnostics that have been used to taxonomize the gradability properties of adjectives. We argue that a plausible explanation for this puzzling data involves distinguishing two properties of gradable adjectives that have been frequently conflated: whether an adjective’s applicability is sensitive to a comparison class, and whether an adjective’s applicability is context-dependent.

This paper demarcates a theoretically interesting class of "evaluational adjectives." This class includes predicates expressing various kinds of normative and epistemic evaluation, such as predicates of personal taste, aesthetic adjectives, moral adjectives, and epistemic adjectives, among others. Evaluational adjectives are distinguished, empirically, in exhibiting phenomena such as discourse-oriented use, felicitous embedding under the attitude verb `find', and sorites-susceptibility in the comparative form. A unified degree-based semantics is developed: What distinguishes evaluational adjectives, semantically, is that (...) they denote context-dependent measure functions ("evaluational perspectives")—context-dependent mappings to degrees of taste, beauty, probability, etc., depending on the adjective. This perspective-sensitivity characterizing the class of evaluational adjectives cannot be assimilated to vagueness, sensitivity to an experiencer argument, or multidimensionality; and it cannot be demarcated in terms of pretheoretic notions of subjectivity, common in the literature. I propose that certain diagnostics for "subjective" expressions be analyzed instead in terms of a precisely specified kind of discourse-oriented use of context-sensitive language. I close by applying the account to `find x PRED' ascriptions. (shrink)

0. Abstract In this paper, I argue that although the behavior of adjectives in context poses a serious challenge to the principle of compositionality of content, in the end such considerations do not defeat the principle. The first two sections are devoted to the precise statement of the challenge; the rest of the paper presents a semantic analysis of a large class of adjectives that provides a satisfactory answer to it. In section 1, I formulate the context thesis, (...) according to which the content of a complex expression depends on the context of its utterance only insofar as the contents of its constituents do. If the context thesis is false, the content of some complex expression is not compositionally determined. In section 2, using an example due to Charles Travis, I construct an objection to the context thesis based on the behavior of the adjective ‘green’. In section 3 and 4, I look at some of the difficulties surrounding the semantics of ‘good’, which provide the motivation for the thesis that most adjectives are contextually incomplete one-place predicates. In section 5, I discuss how ‘green’ and other color adjectives can be treated within such a semantic theory. Since this theory is compatible with the context thesis, the objection against the compositionality of content looses its force. (shrink)

One aim of this essay is to contribute to understanding aesthetic communication—the process by which agents aim to convey thoughts and transmit knowledge about aesthetic matters to others. Our focus will be on the use of aesthetic adjectives in aesthetic communication. Although theorists working on the semantics of adjectives have developed sophisticated theories about gradable adjectives, they have tended to avoid studying aesthetic adjectives—the class of adjectives that play a central role in expressing aesthetic evaluations. (...) And despite the wealth of attention paid to aesthetic adjectives by philosophical aestheticians, they have paid little attention to contemporary linguistic theories of adjectives. We take our work to be a first step in remedying these lacunae. In this paper, we present four experiments that examine one aspect of how aesthetic adjectives ordinarily function: the context-sensitivity of their application standards. Our results present a prima facie empirical challenge to a common distinction between relative and absolute gradable adjectives because aesthetic adjectives are found to behave differently from both. Our results thus also constitute a prima facie vindication of some philosophical aestheticians’ contention that aesthetic adjectives constitute a particularly interesting segment of natural language, even if the boundaries of this segment might turn out to be different from what they had in mind. (shrink)

Radical contextualists have observed that the content of what is said by the utterance of a sentence is shaped in far-reaching ways by the context of utterance. And they have argued that the ways in which the content of what is said is shaped by context cannot be explained by semantic theory. A striking number of the examples that radical contextualists use to support their view involve sentences containing color adjectives ("red", "green", etc.). In this paper, I show how (...) the most sophisticated analysis of color adjectives within the explanatory framework of compositional truth conditional semantics--recently developed by Kennedy and McNally (2010)--needs to be modified to handle the full range of contextual variation displayed by color adjectives. (shrink)

In this volume leading researchers present new work on the semantics and pragmatics of adjectives and adverbs, and their interfaces with syntax. Its concerns include the semantics of gradability; the relationship between adjectival scales and verbal aspect; the relationship between meaning and the positions of adjectives and adverbs in nominal and verbal projections; and the fine-grained semantics of different subclasses of adverbs and adverbs. Its goals are to provide a comprehensive vision of the linguistically significant structural and interpretive (...) properties of adjectives and adverbs, to highlight the similarities between these two categories, and to signal the importance of a careful and detailed integration of lexical and compositional semantics. The editors open the book with an overview of current research before introducing and contextualizing the remaining chapters. The work is aimed at scholars and advanced students of syntax, semantics, formal pragmatics, and discourse. It will also appeal to researchers in philosophy, psycholinguistics, and language acquisition interested in the syntax and semantics of adjectives and adverbs. (shrink)

Radical contextualists have observed that the content of what is said by the utterance of a sentence is shaped in far-reaching ways by the context of utterance. And they have argued that the ways in which the content of what is said is shaped by context cannot be explained by semantic theory. A striking number of the examples that radical contextualists use to support their view involve sentences containing color adjectives ("red", "green", etc.). In this paper, I show how (...) the most sophisticated analysis of color adjectives within the explanatory framework of compositional truth conditional semantics—recently developed by Kennedy and McNally (Synthese 174(1): 79-98 2010)—needs to be modified to handle the full range of contextual variation displayed by color adjectives. (shrink)

This paper attacks the Implicit Reference Class Theory of gradable adjectives and proposes instead a ?pluralist? approach to the semantics of those terms, according to which they can be governed by a variety of different types of standards, one, but only one, of which is the group-indexed standards utilized by the Implicit Reference Class Theory.

It is a consequence of both Kennedy and McNally’s typology of the scale structures of gradable adjectives and Kennedy’s :1–45, 2007) economy principle that an object is clean just in case its degree of cleanness is maximal. So they jointly predict that the sentence ‘Both towels are clean, but the red one is cleaner than the blue one’ :259–288, 2004) is a contradiction. Surely, one can account for the sentence’s assertability by saying that the first instance of ‘clean’ is (...) used loosely: since ‘clean’ pragmatically conveys the property of being close to maximally clean rather than the property of being maximally clean, the sentence as a whole conveys a consistent proposition. I challenge this semantics–pragmatics package by considering the sentence ‘Mary believes that both towels are clean but that the red one is cleaner than the blue one’. We can certainly use this sentence to attribute a coherent belief to Mary: One of its readings says that she believes that the towels are clean by a contextually salient standard ; the other says that she believes that the towels are clean by her own standard. I argue that Kennedy’s semantics–pragmatics package can’t deliver those readings, and propose that we drop the economy principle and account for those readings semantically by assigning to the belief sentence two distinct truth conditions. I consider two ways to deliver those truth-conditions. The first one posits world-variables in the sentence’s logical form and analyzes those truth-conditions as resulting from two binding possibilities of those variables. The second one proposes that the threshold function introduced by the phonologically null morpheme pos is shiftable in belief contexts. (shrink)

We performed three experiments to investigate whether adjectives can modulate the sensorimotor activation elicited by nouns. In Experiment 1, nouns of graspable objects were used as stimuli. Participants had to decide if each noun referred to a natural or artifact, by performing either a precision or a power reach‐to‐grasp movement. Response grasp could be compatible or incompatible with the grasp typically used to manipulate the objects to which the nouns referred. The results revealed faster reaction times (RTs) in compatible (...) than in incompatible trials. In Experiment 2, the nouns were combined with adjectives expressing either disadvantageous information about object graspability (e.g., sharp) or information about object color (e.g., reddish). No difference in RTs between compatible and incompatible conditions was found when disadvantageous adjectives were used. Conversely, a compatibility effect occurred when color adjectives were combined with nouns referring to natural objects. Finally, in Experiment 3 the nouns were combined with adjectives expressing tactile or shape proprieties of the objects (e.g., long or smooth). Results revealed faster RTs in compatible than in incompatible condition for both noun categories. Taken together, our findings suggest that adjectives can shape the sensorimotor activation elicited by nouns of graspable objects, highlighting that language simulation goes beyond the single‐word level. (shrink)

A long-standing tension in semantic theory concerns the reconciliation of positive gradable adjective (GA) ascriptions and comparative GA ascriptions. Vagueness-based ap- proaches derive the comparative from the positive, and face non-trivial challenges with incommensurability and non-GA comparatives. Classic degree-based approaches effectively derive the positive from the comparative, out of sync with the direction of evidence from morphology, and create some difficulties in accounting for GA scale-mates with differing thresholds (e.g., cold ∼ warm ∼ hot). We propose a new reconciliation that (...) capitalizes on recent proposals analyzing GAs as predicates of states. On our account, GAs lexically involve both a threshold property and a background state structure. Positive occurrences of GAs make use of the threshold property, while comparative occurrences make use of degrees representing elements of the background structure. Our approach preserves the virtues of classic degree-based approaches while offering a natural account of scale-mates, and without appeal to covert morphemes like POS or related devices. As we show, it is possible to inject our solution back into the classic degree-based approach, but we find reasons to prefer our states-based account. (shrink)

Japanese has a large number of evidential and modal expressions. Many of the inferential evidentials – mitai, yoo, rashii – also have an adjectival use. On this use, they make a claim about the prototypicality of some object or individual with respect to another class of object, in the case of rashii, or about the similarity of these two objects, for yoo and mitai. This paper provides a compositional semantics for these adjectives, claiming that they are evaluated in terms (...) of the degree to which they instantiate a set of properties (conventionally) associated with a class of object. (shrink)

I have attempted to show that many attributive adjectives can be dealt with within the framework of first-order predicate calculus by the method suggested in this paper. I've also supplied independent reasons for the claim that attributive adjectives that are not responsive to this method require a formal treatment different from the one that the adjectives successfully dealt with by that method require. Thus, if the method I've argued for is sound, then the scope of first-order predicate (...) calculus was shown to be wider than assumed by several logicians. This I take to be of interest from a logical point of view. (shrink)

Sophisticated senator and legislative onion. Whether or not you have ever heard of these things, we all have some intuition that one of them makes much less sense than the other. In this paper, we introduce a large dataset of human judgments about novel adjective-noun phrases. We use these data to test an approach to semantic deviance based on phrase representations derived with compositional distributional semantic methods, that is, methods that derive word meanings from contextual information, and approximate phrase meanings (...) by combining word meanings. We present several simple measures extracted from distributional representations of words and phrases, and we show that they have a significant impact on predicting the acceptability of novel adjective-noun phrases even when a number of alternative measures classically employed in studies of compound processing and bigram plausibility are taken into account. Our results show that the extent to which an attributive adjective alters the distributional representation of the noun is the most significant factor in modeling the distinction between acceptable and deviant phrases. Our study extends current applications of compositional distributional semantic methods to linguistically and cognitively interesting problems, and it offers a new, quantitatively precise approach to the challenge of predicting when humans will find novel linguistic expressions acceptable and when they will not. (shrink)

In this paper I consider Corneliu Porumboiu’s ‘Police, Adjective’ (Romania, 2009) as an instance of a puzzling work of art. Part of what is puzzling about it is the range of extreme responses to it, both positive and negative. I make sense of this puzzlement and try to alleviate it, while considering the film alongside Ludwig Wittgenstein’s arguably puzzling “Lectures on Aesthetics” (from 1938). I use each work to illuminate possible understandings of the other. The upshot is that it is (...) is plausible to regard both as engaged, in part, in preparing us to make sense both of themselves, and then also of other works. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In recent experimental work, the spectrum-like nature of the phenomenon of ordering subjectivity has been accounted for by recourse to the distinction, within the class of subjective adjectives, between multi-dimensional and judge-dependent ones. One way to cash out judge-dependency is in terms of some kind of experiencer-sensitivity. In this paper, we argue that this approach is insufficient. Applying Solt’s experimental paradigm to moral adjectives suggests that, within the class of judge-dependent adjectives, one must draw a further (...) distinction between experiential and evaluative adjectives. This opens up the question of what, if anything, characterizes judge-dependency. We propose that judge-dependency is characterized by the notion of holistic multi-dimensionality: a predicate is holistically multidimensional just in case its denotation is composed by various dimensions whose contribution is inseparable. (shrink)

The presence of temporal adjectives in possessive nominals like John's former car creates two interpretations. On one reading, the temporal adjective modifies the common noun (N-modifying reading). On the other, it modifies the possession relation (POSS-modifying reading). An explanation for this behavior is offered that appeals to what occurs in possessive sentences like John has a former car (N-modifying reading) and John formerly had a car (POSS-modifying reading). In the sentential cases, the source of two readings is two distinct, (...) modifiable phrases. Given the parallels, we propose a structure for possessive nominals analogous to that of possessive clauses. Specifically, we argue that such nominals include a locative small-clause structure, following Freeze (1992), and we explain the ambiguity structurally, as a simple matter of where temporal adjectives attach (NP vs. PP). We show that this analysis provides a straightforward basis for the semantic composition of possessive nominals. (shrink)

This paper studies a distinction that was proposed in previous works between total and partial adjectives. In pairs of adjectives such as safe–dangerous, clean–dirty and healthy–sick, the first (“total”) adjective describes lack of danger, dirt, malady, etc., while the second (“partial”) adjective describes the existence of such properties. It is shown that the semantics of adjective phrases with modifiers such as almost, slightly, and completely is sensitive to whether the adjective is total or partial. The interpretation of such (...) modified constructions is accounted for using a novel scale structure for total and partial adjectives. It is proposed that the standard value of a total adjective is always fixed as the lower bound of the corresponding partial adjective. By contrast, the standard value of partial adjectives can take any point on the partial scale. The effects of this theoretical distinction on the behavior of modified constructions are studied in detail, and their ramifications for the semantic theory of adjectives are discussed. Some other phenomena are surveyed that show evidence for total and partial adjectival constructions with various comparatives and exceptive phrases. (shrink)

Contextualism and Relativism offer competing semantic accounts of personal taste predicates. I argue in this paper that Michael Glanzberg’s defense of contextualism from one relativist argument-the Lost Disagreement Argument-is not successful. I show that Glanzberg’s scalar analysis of the adjectives from which personal taste predicates are built fails to capture the characteristic subjectivity of these predicates. I propose an alternative analysis according to which each personal taste adjective denotes multiple functions from a set of objects to an ordered scale (...) of measurement of the appropriate dimensional property. This analysis succeeds where Glanzberg’s fails and it favors a relativist treatment of personal taste predicates. (shrink)

This paper defends the view that common nouns have a dual semantic structure that includes extension-determining and non-extension-determining components. I argue that the non-extension-determining components are part of linguistic meaning because they play a key compositional role in certain constructions, especially in privative noun phrases such as "fake gun" and "counterfeit document". Furthermore, I show that if we modify the compositional interpretation rules in certain simple ways, this dual content account of noun phrase modification can be implemented in a type-driven (...) formal semantic framework. In addition, I also argue against traditional accounts of privative noun phrases which can be paired with the assumption that nouns do not have a dual semantic structure. At the most general level, this paper presents a proposal for how we can begin to integrate a psychologically realistic account of lexical semantics with a linguistically plausible compositional semantic framework. (shrink)

In my paper, I propose a certain classification of evaluative expressions. I hypothesize that the basic criterion to distinguish between evaluative and descriptive terms is the faultless disagreement test. Next, I discuss a few kinds of phenomena which seem to render this distinction dubious: context–sensitivity, vagueness and using descriptive terms to express evaluative judgments. Further, I investigate Ch. Kennedy’s proposal according to which gradable adjectives can express two kinds of subjectivity. I modify this account by postulating another sub-class of (...) subjective adjectives which are not subjective due to vagueness and which are not evaluative either as they do not necessarily encode any valence. I propose a linguistic test to identify these expressions. Finally, I check where my classification of adjectives places the predicate of personal taste “tasty”. I suggest that “tasty” is both evaluative and experiential and additionally, it carries a condition of its own use, that is the information that can be used to positively assess the taste of something. This, I argue, makes it similar to thin evaluative terms as it carries no descriptive component at all. (shrink)

Peter Geach’s distinction between logically predicative and logically attributive adjectives has gained a certain currency in philosophy. For all that, no satisfactory explanation of what an attributive adjective is has yet been provided. We argue that Geach’s discussion suggests two different ways of understanding the notion. According to one, an adjective is attributive just in case predications of it in combination with a noun fail to behave in inferences like a logical conjunction of two separate predications. According to the (...) other, an adjective is attributive just in case it cannot be applied in a truth-value-yielding fashion unless combined with a noun. The latter way of understanding the notion has been largely neglected by Geach’s critics, but we argue that taking account of it shows the misguided nature of some of their objections, and also yields a more satisfactory explanation of attributivity than does the other. (shrink)