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 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 (2007)). 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 Benthem (1982) and van Rooij (2011a).