Vagueness and Linguistics

An expression is vague, if its meaning is not precise. For vagueness at the sentence-level this means that a vague sentence does not give rise to precise truth conditions. This is a problem for the standard theory of meaning within linguistics, because this theory presupposes that each sentence has a precise meaning with respect to each context of use. The philosophical discussion on ‘vagueness’ concentrates on the notion of tolerance. A expression is vague, or has a tolerant meaning, if it is insensitive to small changes in the objects to which it can be meaningfully predicated. The discussion of ‘vagueness’ in linguistics mostly focusses on the interpretation of so-called ‘gradable adjectives’. Within that class a difference is made between relative adjectives like ‘tall’ and absolute adjectives like ‘flat’. An important difference between these two types of adjectives is that in contrast to relative adjectives, absolute adjectives allow for natural precisifications: if a we fix a level of granularity, relative adjectives are still vague, but absolute adjectives are not. Still, also absolute adjectives give rise to vagueness. This suggests that vagueness also has something to do with what a natural, or appropriate, precisification is. In this paper I first discuss the nature of vagueness, and contrast it with notions such as ambiguity and context-dependence. In section 3 I briefly discuss some reasons that could perhaps explain why vagueness is such a pervasive phenomenon in natural language. Section 4 reviews some more or less standard linguistic analyses of gradable adjectives. I will concentrate myself on approaches that take comparison classes into account. Because comparative constructions are ideally formed in terms of gradable adjectives, comparative ordering relations will be discussed as well. In section 5 it will be argued that one specific ordering relation is crucial for any analysis of vagueness that