11 - Modification, Coercion, and Loose Talk

Summary

The previous chapters investigated coercions that have received attention in the literature—coercions by nouns on their adjectival modifiers and coercions by verbal predicates on their arguments. There are also interesting coercions, however, that result from combining two nouns in a noun–noun compound or in certain cases from combining a noun with an adjective.

These have received less attention but they tell us much about coercion. For instance, adjectives that constrain the denotations of the nouns they modify to be made out of a certain kind of matter or nouns denoting material that compound with other nouns, what I'll call material modifiers have a coercive function. These have been discussed in the literature, but there are other kinds of adjectives that are also coercers but less studied. I will give an overview of these here. My analysis of the coercive function of adjectives will lead us to study what might be in fact another form of predication—-the predication the occurs in so called “loose talk.” Loose talk is a very common phenomenon but also very puzzling; it occurs when we predicate properties of objects that they only have in some approximate or “loose” sense. What that sense is, I'll explain presently.