States versus tropes. Comments on Curt Anderson and Marcin Morzycki: ‘Degrees as kinds’

Vagueness, Degrees, and Gradable Predicates

This is a draft of a chapter for a book, Modification, in preparation for the Cambridge University Press series Key Topics in Semantics and Pragmatics. The full manuscript is also available as a single document on my website, as are some additional chapters. The book is something between a textbook for people who already have a basic background in semantics and a survey of work in the area. For...

Degree Modification of Extreme Adjectives

The Lexical Semantics of Adjectives: More Than Just Scales

This is a draft of a chapter for a book, Modification, in preparation for the Cambridge University Press series Key Topics in Semantics and Pragmatics. The full manuscript is also available as a single document on my website, as are some additional chapters. The book is something between a textbook for people who already have a basic background in semantics and a survey of work in the area. For...

Expressive Modification and the Licensing of Measure Phrases

This squib points out that adjectives with measure phrases are incompatible with expressive modifiers such as goddamn. It shows that this otherwise mysterious fact can be explained relatively straightforwardly if, as Schwarzschild (2005) has argued, positive adjectives can support measure phrases only as the result of a type-shifting rule in the lexicon.

Quantification Galore

Perhaps the most influential understanding of how reference to kinds varies across languages is that of Chierchia (1998). In this framework, determiners can in principle apply to kinds and NPs can in principle denote them. English, like other Germanic languages, is taken to realize the latter possibility. One might reasonably expect, then, that it would also realize the former—that is, that it ...