‘Absolute’ adjectives in belief contexts

The Puzzle(s) of Absolute Adjectives

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 ...

Belief Contexts in Human-computer Dialogue

Formalizing Opacity and Transparency in Belief Contexts

One of the most interesting puzzles in formalizing belief contexts is the fact that many belief reports can be given both an opaque and a transparent reading. A traditional explanation is that the two readings are related to the failure and success of the principle of substitutivity respectively, and this in turn is explained with the de re/de dicto distinction. We propose an alternative analys...

Accessible Referents in “Opaque” Belief Contexts

Problem(s) (for possible-worlds semantics) discussed: accessible ref’s in “opaque” context ◙ “Hob-Nob sentences” (referential dependence between different people’s believes) 3 ◙ Benz’s (2000) puzzle concerning common ground 4 ◙ modal anchoring (Farkas 1993, Roberts 1996:243) 5 ◙ “Huitink’s paradox” (Zeevat 2005:547) 6 ◙ strange cases of (mis)understanding (Alberti 2005b,d) 7 Essence of our prop...

Co-Occurrences of Antonymous Adjectives and Their Contexts

Charles and Miller propose that lexical associations between antonymous adjectives are formed via their co-occurrences within the same sentence (the co-occurrence hypothesis), rather than via their syntactic substitutability (the substitutability hypothesis), and that such cooccurrences must take place more often than expected by chance. This paper provides empirical support for the co-occurren...