Abstract not found

Please quote or cite page numbers from published version only. Saul Kripke pointed out that whether or not an utterance gives rise to a liar-like paradox cannot always be determined by checking just its form or content. 1 Whether or not Jones’s utterance of ‘Everything Nixon said is true ’ is paradoxical depends in part on what Nixon said. Something similar may be said about the sorites paradox. For example, whether or not the predicate ‘are

An issue of interest to work in areas ranging from lexical semantics to natural language processing (especially automatic text generation) to language pedagogy is the

In this article we develop a semantic typology of gradable predicates, with special emphasis on deverbal adjectives. We argue for the linguistic relevance of this typology by demonstrating that the distribution and interpretation of degree modifiers is sensitive to its two major classificatory parameters: (1) whether a gradable predicate is associated with what we call an open or closed scale, and (2) whether the standard of comparison for the applicability of the predicate is absolute or relative to a context. We further showthat the classification of an important subclass of adjectives within the typology is largely predictable. Specifically, the scale structure of a deverbal gradable adjective correlates either with the algebraic part structure of the event denoted by its source verb or with the part structure of the entities to which the adjective applies. These correlations underscore the fact that gradability is characteristic not only of adjectives but also of verbs and nouns, and that scalar properties are shared by categorially distinct but derivationally related expressions.* 1. DEGREE MODIFICATION IN DEVERBAL GRADABLE ADJECTIVES. Among the many observations made in Bolinger’s (1972) classic study of degree expressions in English, two stand out. First, degree modifiers in English have distributions that cannot be given

this paper I argue that questions are asked because their answers help to resolve the questioner's decision problem. By relating questions to decision problems I show (i) how we can measure the utility of questions, and (ii) how these utilities can be used to determine what is actually expressed by agents with their use of interrogative sentences

this paper is about the dynamic behavior of gradable adjectives in general (tall, red, 1

A familiar idea about gradable adjectives is that they denote relations between individuals and degrees. This is most transparent in constructions like (1), where we seem to be witnessing explicit reference to or quantification over degrees. (1) a. John is six feet tall.

One central issue in the theory of clause types is whether force is represented in the syntax. Based on data from English, Italian, and Paduan, we examine this question focusing on a less well-studied clause type, exclamatives. We argue that there is no particular element in syntax responsible for introducing force. Rather, there are two fundamental syntactic components which identify a clause as exclamative, a factive and a Wh operator. These are crucial because they are responsible for two fundamental semantic properties characteristic of exclamatives, namely that they are factive and denote a set of alternative propositions. The force of exclamatives, which we characterize as ‘widening’, is derived indirectly, based on the semantic properties.

Current theories of aspect acknowledge the pervasiveness of verbs of variable telicity, and are designed to account both for why these verbs show such variability and for the complex conditions that give rise to telic and atelic interpretations. Previous work has identified several sets of such verbs, including incremental theme verbs,

Linguistic access to uncertain quantitative knowledge about physical properties is provided by dimensional adjectives, e.g. long-short in the spatial and temporal senses, near-far, fast-slow, etc. Semantic analyses of the dimensional adjectives differ on whether the meaning of the differential comparative (6 cm shorter than) and the equative with factor term (three times as long as) is a compositional function of the meanings the difference and fac- tor terms (6 cm and three times) and the meanings of the simple comparative and equative, respectively. The compositional treatment comes at the price of a meaning representation that some authors ([Pinkal, 1990], [Klein, 1991]) find objectionally un- parsimonious. In this paper, I compare semantic approaches by investigating the complexity of reasoning that they entail; specifically, I show the complexity of constraint propagation over real-valued intervals using the Waltz algorithm in a system where the meaning representations of sen- tences appear as constraints (cf. [Davis, 1987]). It turns out that the compositional account is more complex on this measure.