The mediaeval logic of Aristotelian privation, represented by Ockham’sexposition of All A is non-P as All S is of a type T that is naturally P and no S isP, is critically evaluated as an account of privative negation. It is argued thatthere are two senses of privative negation: (1) an intensifier (as in subhuman),the inverse of Neoplatonic hypernegation (superhuman), which is st...

Despite their simple syntactic form, adjective-noun combinations seem to have no straightforward semantic method that parallels the simplicity of the syntax. This has led to the conventional belief that adjectives belong to a (semantically motivated) hierarchy. This has the consequence that a uniform treatment of adjectives is unattainable—without resorting to notions such as possible worlds, w...

The purpose of this paper is to address the issue of “zeroing out” a tone in the above sense: When is an opposition properly analyzed as the presence vs. absence of a tone, rather than two different indications of tone, e.g. a + vs. of a tone feature?1 Although phonetic pitch (Fo) is scalar in nature, phonological (categorical) tone frequently has a privative character. The most frequent situat...

0. Introduction Montague (1970a) presented a semantic treatment of adjectives which he credited to unpublished work done independently by Hans Kamp and Terence Parsons; that work, and similar independent work of Romaine Clark, was subsequently published (Clark 1970, Kamp 1975, Parsons 1970). The central claim in that work was that adjective meanings should be analyzed as functions from properti...

Kamp (1975) defines a privative adjective as one for which, given adjective A and noun N, the claim 'No AN is a N' is necessarily true.For example, 'fake' is a privative because 'No fake gun is a gun,' is true by definition. In order to explain how 'fake' acts as a modifier, the semanticist's job has been to provide a mechanism for specifying the similarities and differences between real and fa...