2 - The lexical semantics of adjectives: more than just scales

Summary

Introduction

If, at virtually any point in the last decade or two, one formed one's impressions about linguistic theory entirely on the basis of cursory glances at conference announcements – a terrible, terrible idea – one might have concluded that the semantics of adjectives is, above all, the semantics of scales. From a certain perspective, what makes an adjective special, what distinguishes it from a noun or verb, is that it is associated with a scale: tall is about the height scale, ugly is about the ugliness scale, and so on.

Well, of course, there's more than a little truth in this. It's certainly true that scales are a major part of what makes adjectives interesting, and for that reason they have been the object of a great deal of study – and for that reason, too, they will be a major concern throughout the rest of this book. But to suppose that an adjective has nothing more to offer us than its scale is to do it a grave injustice.

This chapter will strive to vindicate this claim. It's about the lexical semantics of adjectives, but it is not about scales. Section 2.2 presents a typology of adjectives according to their effect on the modified noun. Section 2.3 sketches various theoretical approaches that shed light on that typology. Section 2.4 begins the exploration of particular analytically tractable classes of adjectives, focusing on adjectives that interact in interesting ways with their nouns. Section 2.5 continues the exploration of adjective classes, but shifts the focus to adjectives with surprising scope properties. Finally, section 2.6 considers additional issues closely linked to the syntax of adjectives, including their relative order and the positions they can occupy.

Two terminological notes. First, throughout this chapter I will, for convenience, use the terms ‘adjective’ and ‘noun’ when what I actually mean is ‘the maximal projection of an adjective’ (AP or DegP, depending on one's syntactic preferences) and ‘an appropriate projection of a noun’ (NP or perhaps N', depending on one's syntactic preferences).The second point is standard, but needs glossing: I will use ATTRIBUTIVE ADJECTIVE to refer to noun-modifying adjectives (ones attached to a projection of a noun) and PREDICATIVE to refer to the others.