Varieties of intensification

Bylinina, Lisa; Sudo, Yuichi

doi:10.1007/s11049-015-9291-y

Cited by 6 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 13 publications

(12 reference statements)

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“…The meaning of some expressions are dependent upon choosing a perspective for a truth value. Following Bylinina, McCready & Sudo (2015), we call words and phrases that trigger this dependence perspective-sensitive items (henceforth PSIs). Under their definition, PSIs are lexical items whose meaning is dependent on a perspective center (a.k.a.…”

Section: The Semantics Of Perspectivementioning

confidence: 99%

Perspectival biscuits

Mulligan,

Rawlins

2024

SALT

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This paper describes a novel class of biscuit conditional, the 'perspectival biscuit', which arises when an if-clause containing a generic pronoun (e.g., generic you) is used to shift perspective for the interpretation of a perspective-sensitive item in the consequent: e.g., fixing the directionality of behind in "If you're at the door, the cat is behind the desk." This sentence is like a biscuit conditional in that it entails a fully-specified, propositionally stable consequent describing the spatial configuration of cat and desk, but this reading vanishes in favor of a conditional dependence reading when the antecedent contains any non-generic DP, a prediction that is not straightforwardly accounted for by existing theories of biscuit conditionals. An analysis is given demonstrating that biscuithood for perspectival biscuits arises due to generic quantification exclusively over individuals, not worlds.

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Section: The Semantics Of Perspectivementioning

confidence: 99%

Perspectival biscuits

Mulligan,

Rawlins

2024

SALT

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“…Despite some description of this occurrence (e.g. Beltrama & Bochnak, 2015;Bylinina & Sudo, 2015), this paper focus on a gap in the literature on scalar semantics: the use of very with NPs. Therefore, the importance of this study is in its attempt to expand the use of scalar semantics to degree modification of NPs proposing a unified analysis for very in both uses, canonical and non-canonical.…”

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confidence: 99%

Non-canonical Very as a Degree Modifier of NPs in English

Vieira

Sanchez‐Mendes

2020

ELR

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The aim of this paper is to investigate the meaning of constructions with a non-canonical use of very inside NPs and to propose a unified formal semantic analysis for the degree modifier very. We adopt the notion of scalar properties and take as a starting point the fact that very is a typical degree modifier that boosts the degree of open-scale adjectives (e.g. tall) (cf. Kennedy & McNally, 2005). In this work, we focus on what we name non-canonical very: the modification of very on NPs (e.g. the very house John lived in). Our methodology consists of three major steps: firstly, we selected sentences with non-canonical very from The British National Corpus. Then, we selected sentences from five American and British novels published in the 19th and 20th centuries, comparing the sentences with their translations into Portuguese. Based on a first analysis of these sentences and on Matthewson’s (2004) methodology, we proceed to controlled elicitation of contexts with the participation of a native-English speaker of Wales. Data collected present definite DPs and complex NPs, what supports a proposal that consider modification of a scale that is closed and contextually dependent. We argue in favor of an analysis that gives a uniform lexical entry to very and assume that the difference on interpretation of canonical and non-canonical modification is due to scalar properties of the modified predicate. Canonical very modifies lexical open scales whereas non-canonical very modifies contextual closed scales of precision and produces an exhaustive interpretation. The study reveals the importance of logical scalar properties for the semantic investigation of degree modifiers.

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