Incremental Resolution of Relative Adjectives: A DRT-based Approach

This paper is concerned with the incremental interpretation of exophoric referring descriptions with relative gradable adjectives, such as the description in the instruction ‘Pick up the tall glass’. Relative adjectives such as ‘tall ’ are typically considered subsective with respect to the denotation of the head noun and thus pose a challenge to incremental approaches that operate strictly from left to right. However, psycholinguistic research within the eye-tracking paradigm has shown that relative adjectives are interpreted incrementally: listeners interpret them in an incremental manner as they encounter them during processing, without need to wait until the head noun has been heard. Our aim in this paper is to provide a formal account of the incremental interpretation of deictic descriptions with relative gradable adjectives that reflects the psycholinguistic evidence. We propose a DRT-based treatment that combines the approach to incremental interpretation developed by Poesio and Rieser (2010, 2011) with the main ingredients of Van der Sandt’s (1992) presupposition-as-anaphora theory, as implemented by Bos (2003).