Dual Content Semantics, privative adjectives, and dynamic compositionality

Are There Privative Adjectives?

0. Introduction Montague (1970a) presented a semantic treatment of adjectives which he credited to unpublished work done independently by Hans Kamp and Terence Parsons; that work, and similar independent work of Romaine Clark, was subsequently published (Clark 1970, Kamp 1975, Parsons 1970). The central claim in that work was that adjective meanings should be analyzed as functions from properti...

Privative Adjectives: Subsective plus Coercion

Fake Guns and Stone Lions: Conceptual Blending and Privative Adjectives

Kamp (1975) defines a privative adjective as one for which, given adjective A and noun N, the claim 'No AN is a N' is necessarily true.For example, 'fake' is a privative because 'No fake gun is a gun,' is true by definition. In order to explain how 'fake' acts as a modifier, the semanticist's job has been to provide a mechanism for specifying the similarities and differences between real and fa...

A Tradeoff between Compositionality and Complexity in the Semantics of Dimensional Adjectives

Linguistic access to uncertain quantitative knowledge about physical properties is provided by d imens ional 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 comp...

Compositionality and sandbag semantics

It is a common view that radical contextualism about linguistic meaning is incompatible with a compositional explanation of linguistic comprehension. Recently, some philosophers of language have proposed theories of ‘pragmatic’ compositionality challenging this assumption. This paper takes a close look at a prominent proposal of this kind due to François Recanati. The objective is to give a pla...