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Vagueness and grammar: the semantics of relative and absolute gradable adjectives

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Abstract

This paper investigates the way that linguistic expressions influence vagueness, focusing on the interpretation of the positive (unmarked) form of gradable adjectives. I begin by developing a semantic analysis of the positive form of ‘relative’ gradable adjectives, expanding on previous proposals by further motivating a semantic basis for vagueness and by precisely identifying and characterizing the division of labor between the compositional and contextual aspects of its interpretation. I then introduce a challenge to the analysis from the class of ‘absolute’ gradable adjectives: adjectives that are demonstrably gradable, but which have positive forms that relate objects to maximal or minimal degrees, and do not give rise to vagueness. I argue that the truth conditional difference between relative and absolute adjectives in the positive form stems from the interaction of lexical semantic properties of gradable adjectives—the structure of the scales they use—and a general constraint on interpretive economy that requires truth conditions to be computed on the basis of conventional meaning to the extent possible, allowing for context dependent truth conditions only as a last resort.

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  1. Department of Linguistics, University of Chicago, 1010 East 59th St, Chicago, IL, 60637, USA

    Christopher Kennedy

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Correspondence to Christopher Kennedy.

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This paper grew out of joint work with Louise McNally, and owes a great debt to this collaboration. I am also grateful to Chris Barker, Gennaro Chierchia, Delia Graff, Irene Heim, Ed Keenan, Jeffrey King, Sally McConnell-Ginet, Jason Stanley, and audiences at MIT, Princeton, Northwestern, the University of British Columbia, the University of Chicago, the University Amherst, the University of Michigan, the University of Milan-Bicocca, Pennsylvania, the University of Stuttgart, Yale University and the Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin, for very helpful comments and feedback on earlier versions of this work. I would like to express particular gratitude to John MacFarlane and Michael Glanzburg for their thoughtful and insightful reviews of the manuscript, to Mark Richard for two challenging and extremely helpful commentaries on earlier versions of the paper, and to the Associate Editor Kent Bach for probing suggestions, questions, and comments both before and during the L&P review process. Any remaining shortcomings, incoherence, or vagueness are (definitely) my responsibility. This paper is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0094263 and 0618917 and by the American Council of Learned Societies under a Charles Ryskamp Research Fellowship.

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Kennedy, C. Vagueness and grammar: the semantics of relative and absolute gradable adjectives. Linguistics & Philosophy 30, 1–45 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-006-9008-0

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