14 - Vagueness

Summary

Introduction

Vagueness is an ultimate challenge. An enormous diversity of literature on the topic has accumulated over the years, with no hint of a consensus emerging. In light of this, Section 14.2 presents the main aspects of the challenge vagueness poses, focusing on the category of adjectives, and then gives some brief illustrations of the pervasive manifestations of vagueness in grammar.

Section 14.3 deals with the Sorites paradox, which for many philosophers is the hallmark of vagueness. The efforts to solve the Sorites paradox have uncovered a range of important connections between vagueness and other aspects of language and thought. Linguists traditionally leave it to the philosophers to deal with the Sorites and put their own efforts into dealing with other correlates of vagueness in natural language and their consequences for grammar.

Section 14.4 reviews some of these additional phenomena, centering around three issues: (i) the controversial connections between vagueness and morphological gradability, (ii) the similarity and differences between the phenomena of vagueness and imprecision, and (iii) the ways in which vagueness infiltrates various grammatical constructions we find in language, with consequences for the architecture of grammar. The aim of this section is to highlight the main questions which any theory of vagueness will ultimately have to address.

Indications of vagueness

Almost all of the literature on vagueness focuses on the vagueness of predicates. Moreover, much of the literature on vague predicates has concentrated on adjectives. For much of this chapter we follow the tradition in both these respects.

Vagueness in adjectives

Relative adjectives, such as tall, short, big, small, clever, and obtuse, have long since been prominent examples of vagueness, as opposed to sharp adjectives like prime or even, which exemplify what it is for an adjective not to be vague. A third type of absolute adjectives, such as clean, dirty, straight, and bent, suggests that presence or absence of the features indicative of vagueness may not be a black or white matter (see Section 14.4 for more on this point). The present section explains this classification. Positive forms of relative adjectives, as in Danny is tall or The pencil is big, exhibit a bundle of features indicative of vagueness, as follows.