Structure and Ontology in Nonlocal Readings of Adjectives

Abstract

In certain uses, adjectives appear to make the semantic contribution normally associated with adverbs. These readings are often thought to be a peripheral phenomenon, restricted to one corner of the grammar and just a handful of lexical items. I’ll argue that it’s actually considerably more general than is often recognized, and that it admits two fundamentally different modes of explanation: in terms of the syntactic machinery that undergirds these structures and in terms of the ontology of the objects manipulated by its semantics. Both modes of explanation have been suggested for some of the puzzles in this domain, and I’ll argue both are necessary. With respect to adjectives including average and occasional, the key insight is that their lexical semantics is fundamentally about kinds. But to arrive at a more general theory of adverbial readings, it is also necessary to further articulate the compositional semantics. In this spirit, I’ll argue that these adjectives actually have the semantic type of quantificational determiners like every. If this way of thinking about adverbial readings is on the right track, it instantiates a means by which these two distinct modes of explanation—and the distinct aspects of cognition they may ultimately be associated with—both play a crucial role in bringing about the apparently aberrant behavior of this class of adjectives.

Kind‐Level Predicates of Events Inside Another Predication☆

“…The former has a wide construal because it is associated with the predicate of the containing clause. This type of DEKE is one type of the so‐called non‐local modifiers of nouns in Schwarz (2006) and Morzycki (2019, to appear). In contrast, the latter has a narrow construal because it is not associated with such a predicate; instead, it looks like “a DP internal matter” (Sæbø 2016:9).…”

An expletive negation unlike any other in Québec French

“…Krifka (1995) and Chierchia (2006Chierchia ( , 2013, that 'domain widening' is tied to the activation of sub-domain alternatives. 12 Such adjacency effects are reminiscent of proposals of non-local modification, which also resort to the formation of complex morphemes (Zimmermann 2003;Morzycki 2016). In such proposals, it is argued that determiners and modifiers can combine to form complex determiners.…”