Compositionality and Coercion in Semantics: the Dynamics of Adjective Meaning 1

The focus of the paper will be some aspects of the interaction of meaning and context with different kinds of adjectives. Adjective meanings are shown to be more constrained than was appreciated in earlier work. Facts about “NP-splitting” in Polish cast serious doubt on the standard hierarchy of adjectives, and the data become much more orderly if privative adjectives are reanalyzed as subsective adjectives. This revised account requires the possibility of coerced expansion of the denotation of the noun to which an adjective is applied. Compositionality can be seen as one of the driving forces in such context-sensitive meaning shifts.