Color, context, and compositionality

Abstract

Color adjectives have played a central role in work on language typology and variation, but there has been relatively little investigation of their actual meanings by researchers in formal semantics. This is particularly surprising given the fact that color terms have been at the center of debates in the philosophy of language over foundational questions, in particular whether the idea of a compositional, truth-conditional theory of natural language semantics is even coherent. The challenge presented by color terms is articulated in greatest detail in the work of Charles Travis. Travis argues that structurally isomorphic sentences containing color adjectives can shift truth value from context to context depending on how they are used and in the absence of effects of vagueness or ambiguity/polysemy, and concludes that a deterministic mapping from structures to truth conditions is impossible. The goal of this paper is to provide a linguistic perspective on this issue, which we believe defuses Travis' challenge. We provide empirical arguments that color adjectives are in fact ambiguous between gradable and nongradable interpretations, and that this simple ambiguity, together with independently motivated options concerning scalar dimension within the gradable reading accounts for the Travis facts in a simpler, more constrained, and thus ultimately more successful fashion than recent contextualist analyses such as those in Szabó (2001) or Rothschild and Segal (forthcoming).

Dual Content Semantics, privative adjectives, and dynamic compositionality

“…To mention a few examples, there are influential accounts of quantifiers (Szabó & Stanley 2000), modals (Kratzer 2012), predicative and attributive adjectives (Rothschild & Segal 2009, Kennedy & McNally 2010, Recanati 2010, and noun-noun compounds (Weiskopf 2007) that posit context-sensitive parameters in logical form. There are also various arguments for the view that the meaning of expressions in general, and not only those that have context-sensitive parameters, is usually modulated during online processing (Carston 1997, Recanati 2004.…”

“…That some such restriction is required seems to me uncontroversial; otherwise this sort of account will over-predict "reasonable" meaning shifts that are actually not available. The over-generation problem faced by unrestricted contextualist accounts is illustrated with several interesting examples in Asher 2011 and, focusing on color words, in Kennedy & McNally 2010. For our purposes, we can ignore further details of how mod should be constrained.…”

Conceptual Versus Referential Affordance in Concept Composition

“…On one version of the approach, modification is mediated by a maximally underspecified relation whose value, much like that of a pronoun, is resolved in context (examples include McNally and Boleda 2004;Kennedy and McNally 2010 (Kaplan 1989). These analyses are respectively illustrated in (7).…”

Advances in the study of Siouan languages and linguistics

“…This puts resultatives in Hocąk in line with resultative constructions cross-linguistically that use APs as result predicates (cf. English 13 I assume that color adjectives, such as šuuc 'red', are gradable (Kennedy & McNally 2010). 14 The contrast between (43) and (45) illustrates another way in which stative verbs and adjectives differ.…”