Kennedy 1997

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Projecting the Adjective: The Syntax and Semantics of Gradability and Comparison

Christopher Kennedy
UCSC PhD dissertation, 1997

This dissertation argues that gradable adjectives like bright, dense and short denote measure functions --- functions from objects to abstract representations of measurement, or scales and degrees. This proposal is shown to provide a foundation for principled explanations of a wide range of syntactic and semantic properties of gradable adjectives and the constructions in which they appear, ranging from the syntactic distribution of gradable adjectives to the scopal characteristics of comparatives and the empirical effects of adjectival polarity.

Chapter 1 presents an overview of the core semantic properties of gradable adjectives and outlines the two primary approaches to their meaning that have appeared in the literature. Building on a number of empirical observations, the chapter reaches two conclusions: first, the meaning of gradable adjectives should be characterized in terms of scales and degrees, and second, two traditional assumptions --- the hypothesis that gradable adjectives denote relations between objects and degrees, and the analysis of complex degree constructions such as comparatives as expressions that quantify over degrees --- do not explain the scopal properties of comparatives.

Chapter 2 presents the analysis of gradable adjectives as measure functions and argues that gradable adjectives combine with a degree morphology to generate properties of individuals, which are defined in terms of relations between two degrees. This analysis not only provides an explanation for the facts discussed in Chapter 1, but also supports a robust account of the compositional semantics of a range of degree constructions within a syntactic framework in which gradable adjectives project extended functional structure headed by degree morphology.

Finally, Chapter 3 investigates the ontology of degrees and the characterization of adjectival polarity, focusing on the anomaly of comparatives constructed out of antonymous pairs of adjectives and the monotonicity properties of polar adjectives. The facts are shown to support an ontology in which degrees are formalized as intervals on a scale, or extents, and a structural distinction is made between two sorts of extents: positive extents and negative extents. This distinction forms the basis for a sortal characterization of adjectival polarity.

email the author at ck at uchicago.edu

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