Adjectives relate individuals to states: Evidence from the two readings of English Determiner + Adjective

Abstract

As an argument in favor of the (minority) view that adjectives involve a neo-Davidsonian state argument, I argue that it grounds an analysis of the English Determiner + Adjective construction (the old). On its " individuated" reading (the old are generally happier), this construction seems to refer to old individuals; on its "mass" reading (the old is never ordinary), to something like oldness. Empirically, this paper uses naturally-occurring data to show that both readings are more productive than sometimes suggested. Theoretically, the two readings are parsimoniously derived by existentially closing off one or the other of the two arguments (the individual argument x, the state argument s) made available by the state analysis-λxλs[old(s) ∧ holder(x,s)]-deriving a predicate of individuals for the individuated reading, and a predicate of states for the mass reading. This account of Determiner + Adjective further reflects the philosophical idea that properties can be construed as predicates of individuals or as the abstract thing that those individuals share; and connects to other ways of nominalizing both verb phrases and adjectives.

Encoding States Is Not Enough: The Case of Spanish Deadjectival Nominalizations1

“…With this in mind, we can move on to the technical details of Anderson's & Morzycki's proposal. In line with the Neo‐Davidsonian tradition and other contemporary authors (Higginbotham 1985; Parsons 1990; Landman 2000; Mittwoch 2005; Wellwood 2014, 2015; Glass 2014, 2019; Ernst 2016; a.o. ), Anderson & Morzycki claim that gradable adjectives must contain a state variable s .…”

“…Concerning adjectives, it has been widely claimed (Dowty 1979; Higginbotham 1985; Parsons 1990; Smith 1991; Landman 2000; Mittwoch 2005; Wellwood 2014, 2015; Glass 2014, 2019; Ernst 2016) that they (at least the ones that can appear in predicative position, like gradable adjectives) express states, and the literature on Spanish is not oblivious to this tradition (De Miguel 1999; Arche 2006; Marín 2013; Jaque 2014; a.o.). In Spanish, the main argument that we can adduce in favor of their eventuality nature is that they can combine with temporal modifiers, which indicates that gradable adjectives express properties that hold in time:…”

“…That mass deadjectival nominalizations express states is not a new contribution: Roy (2010), for French; Villalba (2013), for Spanish; Borer (2013) and Glass (2019), for English; and Baglini (2015), for Wolof and English, have already proposed that mass deadjectival nominalizations express states. However, although this characterization is correct, it is also insufficient inasmuch as there is empirical evidence that mass deadjectival nominalizations cannot express perfective states.…”

“…While there exists a general consensus on treating verbs and adjectives as predicates of eventualities (in the wide sense of Bach 1986, which includes events and states), the semantics of mass deadjectival nominalizations has been a matter of debate last years, and the literature on this topic has appealed to different semantic objects in order to account for their specific content. In particular, it has been claimed that DPs containing mass deadjectival nominalizations denote degrees (Bochnak 2013), qualities (Villalba 2009, 2011; Martin 2013; Fábregas 2016), tropes (Moltmann 2004, 2009, 2015; King [née Richtarcikova] 2017), states (Roy 2010; Villalba 2013; Borer 2013; Baglini 2015; Glass 2019), or rather they must be treated as canonical mass nouns like water (Nicolas 2010; Francez & Koontz‐Garboden 2015, 2017a, 2017b). As mentioned above, my analysis is aligned with state‐based analyses, but I propose a crucial refinement in order to incorporate the imperfective character of the nominalizations in question.…”

Interpreting Degree Semantics

“…To say that (15a) involves instances where there must be alignment between what is measured and how it is measured (i.e., what scale is used to represent the measurement) is to say that the dimensions for comparison with bare more uniformly 14 Recent research has toyed with revising this basic assumption, analyzing gradable adjectives in terms of properties of states rather than in terms of degree functions (see Fults, 2006;Wellwood, 2012Wellwood, , 2015Baglini, 2015;Pasternak, 2017;Cariani et al, 2018;Glass, 2019). 15 I say "bare" because it does not appear with a lexical adjective or adverb.…”