IntroductionOne of the more interesting properties of the grammar of modification is that it can reveal connections across syntactic categories and across semantic types. There remain on our agenda a ...few issues that provide a taste of this – ones that involve multiple categories or interactions among several of the domains we've already examined.This chapter takes up these crosscategorial issues. In section 6.2, we confront expressions that measure individuals by their amount, and the comparatives built out of these expressions. This requires combining our standing assumptions about degree semantics with assumptions about DPs and individuals. Section 6.3 examines the issue of crosscategorial gradability more broadly, focusing on verbs and nouns, both of which seem to be gradable in different ways and one of which introduces into the discussion some new parallels between individuals and events. Section 6.4 addresses the problem of crosscategorial modifiers that hedge or reinforce a claim, but can't be readily assimilated to the degree modifiers we've already encountered in other domains. Section 6.5 focuses on an issue we've systematically set aside throughout the book: nonrestrictive interpretations of modifiers, which turn out to extend far beyond relative clauses, their traditional home. Part of that entails struggling with what ‘nonrestrictive’ actually means. Finally, section 6.6 investigates an aspect of meaning that is inherently subjective in a particular way that can be made precise – and that makes it possible for interlocutors to contradict each other truth-conditionally without being at odds pragmatically.Amounts and Cardinality ScalesQuantity adjectives and number wordsThe aim of section 6.2 is to provide a sketch of how the assumptions we've made about degrees and degree constructions in Chapters 3 and 4 might scale up to uses such as those in (1):(1)a. There were many monkeys.b. There were three monkeys.c. There were more than three monkeys.d. There were more monkeys than there were ferrets.The important fact about these examples is that they involve evaluating or comparing on a scale of cardinality, the number of individuals that make up a plurality.
Adverbs Morzycki, Marcin
Modification,
11/2015
Book Chapter
IntroductionIf adverbs were sentient, we might pity them. Sometimes, they are treated as nothing more than adjectives crudely tarted up with some minor ornamental morphology. At other times, they are ...treated as the ‘wastebasket category’, because ‘adverb’ is what you call a word when you've run out of other names to call it. All sorts of stray mystery particles have been described as adverbs, for the most tenuous of reasons or for no particular reason at all. Worse still, the term is often taken to include not just a motley assortment of scarcely related lexical riffraff but also whole phrases without regard to their syntactic category. Loiter around the peripheries of a clause for too long, and you too might be accused of being an adverb.To be mistreated unjustly is bad. It's worse when it's precisely what you deserve. The prototypical exemplars of adverbs are genuinely very adjective-like, and languages don't always bother to make the distinction. And these expressions really do seem alarmingly and confoundingly promiscuous in their distribution. Even so, whatever their internal properties, the question of how they fit into the semantics of larger expressions is interesting. Equally interesting is what about their semantics accounts for their versatility. Adverbs in this more restricted sense – adjective-like things in non-adjective-like positions – will be the focus of this chapter. For the most part, modifiers of other categories will enter the discussion only to the extent that their semantic contribution resembles that of adverbs proper. More generally, I will observe a distinction between ‘adverb’, the name of a syntactic category, and ‘adverbial’, the collective term for phrases headed by adverbs and for phrasal modifiers of verbal projections and clauses.Part of the focus on adverbs in the more restricted sense is practical. Discussing adverbials as a class would entail discussing virtually all of formal semantics. There's hardly any area of the field that hasn't been concerned to a large extent with some class of adverbials in one way or another, and in certain areas – such as temporal semantics – the analysis of adverbials constitutes much of the enterprise. Unavoidably, though, I'll briefly touch on some adverbials whose serious examination is best undertaken by looking elsewhere (say, a book on temporal semantics). Many issues that fall under the broad rubric of ‘adverbials’ will also be taken up in Chapter 6 as instances of crosscategorial phenomena.
IntroductionFlorence Nightingale suffered from two afflictions:• She had one leg shorter than the other.• She also had one leg longer than the other.This is according to the comedian Graeme Garden, ...who was lying. (Her legs were fine, both of them.) In doing so, he was playing on some relatively subtle intuitions about the semantics of the comparative. The joke would still have worked, more or less, if he had said this:(1) She also had one leg not as long as the other.But this would be worse, or in any case less funny than just weird:(2) She also had one leg not as short as the other.What the joke depends on – to kill it by explanation – is that the two afflictions entail each other, on either the original formulation or (1). The problem with (2) is that it introduces an unwelcome additional entailment: that her legs were short. Why the difference in entailments?This chapter will examine the semantics of comparatives and their grammatical relatives, such as the equative, which positively bristle with such subtle and often vexing puzzles. These puzzles provide insight into a surprisingly wide array of issues: the nature of comparison, of course, but also the ontology of degrees, scope-taking mechanisms, ellipsis, negative polarity items, modality, focus, type-shifting, contextual domain restrictions, imprecision, and semantic crosslinguistic variation. This will also give us an opportunity to address the syntax of the extended AP in earnest for the first time.Section 4.2 confronts the mapping between syntax and semantics in the adjectival extended projection, with special attention to the comparative. Section 4.3 provides a tour of other degree constructions, including differential comparatives, equatives, superlatives, and others. Section 4.4 is the one most directly relevant to the puzzle we began the chapter with: the question of why the entailments of apparently very similar degree constructions differ subtly. Finally, section 4.5 concludes with a discussion of the crosslinguistic picture. Throughout this chapter, I will assume a degree-based framework. This is chiefly because most of the work in this area does so – but that too is for a reason.
IntroductionIf, at virtually any point in the last decade or two, one formed one's impressions about linguistic theory entirely on the basis of cursory glances at conference announcements – a ...terrible, terrible idea – one might have concluded that the semantics of adjectives is, above all, the semantics of scales. From a certain perspective, what makes an adjective special, what distinguishes it from a noun or verb, is that it is associated with a scale: tall is about the height scale, ugly is about the ugliness scale, and so on.Well, of course, there's more than a little truth in this. It's certainly true that scales are a major part of what makes adjectives interesting, and for that reason they have been the object of a great deal of study – and for that reason, too, they will be a major concern throughout the rest of this book. But to suppose that an adjective has nothing more to offer us than its scale is to do it a grave injustice.This chapter will strive to vindicate this claim. It's about the lexical semantics of adjectives, but it is not about scales. Section 2.2 presents a typology of adjectives according to their effect on the modified noun. Section 2.3 sketches various theoretical approaches that shed light on that typology. Section 2.4 begins the exploration of particular analytically tractable classes of adjectives, focusing on adjectives that interact in interesting ways with their nouns. Section 2.5 continues the exploration of adjective classes, but shifts the focus to adjectives with surprising scope properties. Finally, section 2.6 considers additional issues closely linked to the syntax of adjectives, including their relative order and the positions they can occupy.Two terminological notes. First, throughout this chapter I will, for convenience, use the terms ‘adjective’ and ‘noun’ when what I actually mean is ‘the maximal projection of an adjective’ (AP or DegP, depending on one's syntactic preferences) and ‘an appropriate projection of a noun’ (NP or perhaps N', depending on one's syntactic preferences).The second point is standard, but needs glossing: I will use ATTRIBUTIVE ADJECTIVE to refer to noun-modifying adjectives (ones attached to a projection of a noun) and PREDICATIVE to refer to the others.
