Vagueness in degree constructions

2011

The thesis explores the syntactic and semantic dimensions of four linguistic elements that appear in Modern Greek arguably as quantifiers and modifiers, i.e., in the form of Quantificational Modifiers (QMods) olos 'all, whole, overall' and its extension olikos 'total', merikos 'some, a few, partial', ligos 'some, few, little, insignificant' and polls 'many, great, considerable'. Such QMods are analyzed as 'measure' quantifiers of scalar semantics that appeal' in a syntactic position common to adjectival modifiers. The thesis explores specific sets of reading and their interpretations. Such a phenomenon is common to Modern Greek, English, French and Arabic QMods and gives evidence to the universality of Quantificational Modification as a semantic subclass of Quantification. Chapter 1 discusses Quantification as semantic interpretation along with the main questions this research intends to answer, while Chapter 2 reviews recent liter...

Proceedings of the International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, 2003

In this paper we present an analysis of English measure noun phrases. Measure noun phrases exhibit both distributional idiosyncrasy, in that they appear in positions normally filled by degree adverbs: "a ten inch long string"; and agreement discord: "ten inches is enough", "it is ten inch/*inches long". The analysis introduces one idiosyncratic construction, the Measure Phrase Rule, which links together syntax and inflectional morphology. Combined with existing rules, in particular the Noun-noun Compound Rule, the new rule accounts for the both the distributional and agreement idiosyncrasies. The rule has been implemented and tested in the ERG, a broad-coverage grammar of English. Our analysis supports the position that broad-coverage grammars will necessarily contain both highly schematic and highly idiosyncratic rules.

Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur, 2017

This volume provides a stimulating blend of theoretically driven research questions and corpus study, of qualitative and quantitative methodology. It focuses on the morphosyntactic variation displayed by the most common lexical items expressing quantity and their dependents in the history of German, from 700 to the present day. The topic is sufficiently restricted to be comprehensively dealt with in the size of a volume. Nevertheless, it is also potentially relevant to broad linguistic research on the categorial nature of quantity items, the organization of nominal structure, the structural relation between the quantity item and the element on which it quantifies and, ultimately, on the general possibilities of variation and change that are available to language. The corpus search is theoretically driven and provides a systematic description of the variation occurring in the inflectional properties of the quantity item, the position of the dependent, and the variation between genitive case assignment vs. concord with the dependent. The theoretical aim is to offer a novel analysis of diachronic change in the minimalist framework. The proposals are shaped in the recent developments of minimalist syntax, without being too technical. This makes the analysis accessible to a broader public of historical and general linguists who may not be directly interested in the theory-internal issues. In fact, the empirical data resulting from the theory-driven corpus search are stated in a pre-theoretical fashion and can certainly be considered as a milestone in our knowledge of this empirical field, which is usually quite controversial in all languages. Quantity items are known to display inconsistent properties as regards their categorial status, being sometimes nominal, sometimes adverbial, sometimes adjectival, and most times a mix of these. Linguists of all theoretical persuasions acknowledge that such an unstable status is the major source of synchronic variation at given stages of the language and of change from one stage to another. It is debated how to diagnose categorial status and what relational properties different categories can have. The debate not only regards competing frameworks, but it is most lively theory-internally, as witnessed for the generative framework by . Dorian Roehrs and Christopher Sapp develop their own

This paper provides a unified solution to two puzzles involving vagueness and scalar adjectives of the absolute lexical class (ex. bald, empty, straight etc.). The first puzzle concerns the proper analysis of the relationship between contextual effects associated with absolute adjectives and those associated with relative adjectives like tall, long or expensive. The dominant view in philosophy is that tall and bald are both vague constituents. However, an emerging view in linguistics is that the context-sensitivity exhibited by bald is not due to vagueness but a different phenomenon: imprecision (cf. Kennedy ). I argue that the properties of both tall and bald that appear to challenge our classical semantic theories are symptoms of a single phenomenon: vagueness. I provide a unified analysis of these properties that accounts for Kennedy's data using Cobreros, Égré, Ripley, and van Rooij (2010)'s Tolerant, Classical, Strict (TCS) non-classical logical framework. The second puzzle is the puzzle of the gradability of absolute adjectives. It has been observed that these constituents seem to have a non-context-sensitive meaning. However, on the other hand, they are clearly gradable (John is balder than Peter). I show how, using TCS, we can preserve the the empirical benefits of the proposal that these adjectives have absolute semantics, while constructing the pragmatic scales associated with them using methods in the same vein as van and van Rooij (2011a).

Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics, 2010

We analyze patterns of variation in degree constructions as ultimately semantically motivated (Beck et al. 2004); more precisely, as rooted at the (structured) level of logical form via a parameter based on binding. The paper pursues two related objectives. First, we complement the sharp distinction between languages like Japanese vs. English with a case of a language that seems to be parametrically intermediate. We suggest that Modern Romanian is sensitive to largely the same configurations which are conspicuous in the Japanese/English split, but that it marks the relevant dependencies overtly. Second, we probe for the grammaticalization process of the pertinent functional items involved in marking degree dependencies by conducting a diachronic pilot study. In this part of the article, we analyze data from (literary) Old Romanian. We investigate the degree constructions at this stage of the language in preliminary fashion and point out that they display a particularly instable situation with regard to the diagnostics of the degree parameter discussed, a factor which may have enhanced the grammaticalization of the particular strategies under discussion and hence co-motivates the apparently idiosyncratic current distribution in the language.