Comparative constructions are used to express explicit orderings between two objects with respect to the degree or amount to which they possess some gradable property. The semantic analysis of comparatives is built on top of a more general analysis of gradable predicates, which makes crucial uses of abstract representations of measurement (scales), formalized as sets of objects (degrees) ordered with respect to some dimension (size, speed, brightness, etc.). The interaction of the basic semantics of gradability with the combinatorics of clausal syntax permits the expression of an unlimited number of arbitrarily complex comparisons, and leads to interactions between comparatives and other logical expressions in a sentence.

Alrenga et al.(2012) (AKM) propose that in English, both the predicate-marking morpheme -er/more and the standard-marking morpheme than introduce the semantics of comparison. AKM's primary goal is to account for correlations between the scope of the standard phrase and the scope of comparison, but they also gesture at some potential implications of their analysis for the typology of comparatives. This paper examines these typological implications in more detail, by exploring the hypothesis that a point of cross-linguistic variation has to do whether the semantic content of comparison is introduced by an expression that composes with the predicate, by one that composes with the standard, or in both places. Taking AKM as a starting point, I will outline a set of properties that we expect a language to have depending on how it fits into this typology. I will then provide some initial evidence in support of the typology by showing that if English shows the expected properties of a "both" language, Mandarin Chinese shows the properties of a language in which comparison is exclusively in the predicate, and Japanese shows the properties of a language in which comparison is exclusively in the standard.

Subjective predicates have two interpretive and distributional characteristics that have resisted a comprehensive analysis. First, the use of a subjective predicate to describe an object is in general felicitous only when the speaker has a particular kind of familiarity with relevant features of the object; characterizing an object as tasty, for example, implies that the speaker has experience of its taste. Second, subjective predicates differ from objective predicates in their distribution under certain types of propositional attitude verbs. The goal of this paper is to argue that these features can be explained in a uniform way and within a broadly truth-conditional approach to semantic content, given a view of subjective language as an essentially pragmatic, context-sensitive phenomenon. Specifically, we propose that what renders an issue subjective in discourse is speakers' awareness of counterstance contingency: contingency relative to information states that represent alternative pragmatic stances.

It has been frequently observed in the literature that assertions of plain sentences containing predicates like fun and frightening give rise to an acquaintance inference: they imply that the speaker has first-hand knowledge of the item under consideration. The goal of this paper is to develop and defend a broadly expressivist explanation of this phenomenon: acquaintance inferences arise because plain sentences containing subjective predicates are designed to express distinguished kinds of attitudes that differ from beliefs in that they can only be acquired by undergoing certain experiences. Its guiding hypothesis is that natural language predicate expressions lexically specify what it takes for their use to be properly 'grounded' in a speaker's state of mind: what state of mind a speaker must be in for a predication to be in accordance with the norms governing assertion. The resulting framework accounts for a range of data surrounding the acquaintance inference as well as for striking parallels between the evidential requirements on subjective predicate uses and the kind of considerations that fuel motivational internalism about the language of morals. A discussion of how the story can be implemented compositionally and of how it compares with other proposals currently on the market is provided.

Gradable adjectives denote properties that are relativized to contextual thresholds of application: how long an object must be in order to count as long in a context of utterance depends on what the threshold is in that context. But thresholds are variable across contexts and adjectives, and are in general uncertain. This leads to two questions about the meanings of gradable adjectives in particular contexts of utterance: what truth conditions are they understood to introduce, and what information are they taken to communicate? In this paper, we consider two kinds of answers to these questions, one from semantic theory, and one from Bayesian pragmatics, and assess them relative to human judgments about truth and communicated information. Our findings indicate that Bayesian accounts can model human judgments about what is communicated better than they can model human judgments about truth conditions, but the performance improves if the Bayesian approach is supplemented with the threshold conventions postulated by semantic

Previous studies on learning and adaptation have largely focused on speech perception and syntactic parsing, but much less is known about whether and how language users adjust their semantic representation after being exposed to other individuals’ utterances. The current study focuses on the interpretation of gradable adjectives — expressions with highly context-dependent interpretations — and investigates how individuals adjust their thresholds of application after exposure to utterances of the same expressions by other language users. Three experiments provide novel evidence to support robust and rapid semantic adaptation for gradable adjectives, the effect of which is modulated by the types of utterances and the class of adjectives participants were exposed to, as well as the communicative goal of the linguistic task and the identity of the communicative partner. We propose a single unified probabilistic belief update analysis to account for all of the observations. Under our account, threshold adaptation naturally falls out as the result of a listener-speaker coordination process, which is guided by general principles of pragmatic reasoning. The current empirical findings and theoretical proposals also find parallels in the perceptual learning and speech adaptation domain, suggesting a domain general mechanism of learning and adaptation at multiple levels of linguistic representation.

This paper focusses on two interpretive and distributional characteristics of subjective predicates that have resisted a comprehensive analysis: subjective predicates introduce acquaintance inferences, and they di↵er from objective predicates in their distribution under certain types of propositional attitude verbs. The goal of this paper is to argue that these features can be derived in a uniform way, without introducing special kinds of meanings or interpretive operations for subjective predicates, and within a broadly truth-conditional approach to semantic content, given a view of subjective language as an essentially pragmatic, contextsensitive phenomenon. Specifically, we propose that what renders an issue subjective in discourse is speakers’ awareness of counterstances: alternative information states that reflect conflicting pragmatic stances on language use. We show how a characterization of subjective predicates as counterstance contingent expressions not only derives their distributional properties, but also explains why their use comes with distinct acquaintance inferences.

This chapter investigates the relationship between adjectives and event structure by looking at properties of deverbal adjectives and deadjectival verbs. Although simple adjectives are not eventive, they nevertheless play an important role in matters of event structure, both in the way that they influence the eventive properties of verbs that they are derivationally related to, and in the way that an understanding of the scalar properties of adjectival meaning informs theorizing about eventive meanings. Although often considered in isolation, we show that adjectival gradability and verbal aspect are intimately related scalar phenomena. The structural properties of an adjectival scale determine the aspectual class of a derived event predicate. Similarly, the aspectual structure of a verb phrase constrains the scale structure of an adjectival participle. Our discussion focuses primarily on degree-based approaches to these phenomena, but we also consider alternative approaches based in a more articulated ontology for states.

Ambiguity and vagueness are two varieties of interpretive uncertainty which are often discussed together, but are distinct both in their essential features and in their significance for semantic theory and the philosophy of language. Ambiguity involves uncertainty about mappings between levels of representation with different structural characteristics, while vagueness involves uncertainty about the actual meanings of particular terms. This article examines ambiguity and vagueness in turn, providing a detailed picture of their empirical characteristics and the diagnostics for identifying them, and explaining their significance for theories of meaning. Although this article continues the tradition of discussing ambiguity and vagueness together, one of its goals is to emphasize the ways that these phenomena are distinct in their empirical properties, in the factors that give rise to them, and in the analytical tools that can be brought to bear on them.

Previous work has largely agreed that the verbal anaphors do it/this/that can freely be resolved with respect to information in either the linguistic or nonlinguistic context, whereas there has been more debate regarding the resolution strategy for verb phrase ellipsis. We present an experiment that confirms the intuition that interpretations of do that are highly sensitive to information in the nonlinguistic context. Comparison to a prior experiment on verb phrase ellipsis using the same paradigm reveals that ellipsis is much less sensitive to nonlinguistic manipulations, suggesting that it is not resolved solely with respect to salient discourse events, and that there is a separate linguistic identity requirement for ellipsis.

Referential Effects of Contrast (RECs) involving reference resolution of adjectivally modified NPs (e.g., the tall glass) have been attributed to pragmatic reasoning based on the informativity of modification (Sedivy et al. Cognition, 71(2):109-147, 1999; Sedivy, Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 32(1): 323, 2003; Sedivy, Approaches to studying world-situated language use: Bridging the language-as-product and language-as-action traditions, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 345-364, 2004, a.o.). Recently, it has been claimed that informativity alone cannot account for all the attested interactions between adjectival meaning and context and that factors related to efficiency in the search of a referent also play an important role (Rubio-Fernandez, Frontiers in Psychology, 7(153), 2016). Building on Aparicio et al. (Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory, vol. 25, 2015), this paper demonstrates that perceived informativity plays an important role in RECs, but lexical semantic properties of different adjective classes are also relevant. We present results from a Visual World eye-tracking study which shows that adjective classes differ in whether they introduce RECs, and results from an offline judgment task which show that this difference correlates to some extent with the perceived informativity of members of these classes. Color adjectives, relative adjectives and maximum standard absolute adjectives were rated as overinformative when used as modifiers in the absence of contrast, and gave rise to RECs; minimum standard absolute adjectives were not rated as overinformative when used as modifiers in the absence of contrast, and did not give rise to RECs. Taken together, our results show that perceived informativity plays an important role in RECs. We also discuss additional differences between the adjective classes which suggest that differences in lexical semantics can further contribute to differences in RECs.

Gradable adjectives denote properties that are relativized to context dependent thresholds of application: how long an object must be in order to count as long in a context of utterance depends on what the threshold is. In the typical case, thresholds are uncertain, a feature that distinguishes them from other kinds of contextual parameters. Threshold uncertainty has played a prominent role in discussions of vagueness in philosophy of language, but there has been relativelly little attention to this feature of adjective meaning in linguistic semantics and pragmatics, and correspondingly little attention to a fundamental question about communication with gradable adjectives: what are the principles that govern decisions about threshold values in context, and so determine the communicative content of gradable adjectives in a speech situation? In this paper, we consider two recent answers to this question, which differ in the role that formal properties of adjective meaning play in determining threshold values. On one view, decisions about thresholds are based entirely on probabilisitic prior knowledge of how the objects in a gradable adjective’s domain distribute relative to the scalar property it expresses (Lassiter & Goodman 2014, 2015); according to the second view, a formal property of adjective meaning — scale structure — is primarily responsible for threshold determination (Kennedy 2007, Potts 2008, Qing & Franke 2014a,b). We identify different predictions of the two approaches and present the results of an experimental study that supports the representational approach over the distributional one.

Gradable adjectives (GAs) provide an ideal domain for evaluating theories of the interface betwen semantic interpretation and context: relative and absolute GAs are both context dependent, but absolute adjectives can have precise meanings in a way that relative adjectives cannot. We provide processing evidence for the hypothesis that imprecision in absolute adjectives is a pragmatic phenomenon: absolute thresholds are semantically scalar endpoints, and imprecise uses are derived by a global pragmatic threshold, which specifies how much deviation from literal meaning is pragmatically ignorable in a context (see e.g. Lasersohn 1999). The evidence comes from a set of visual world eye-tracking experiments adapted from the design of Sedivy, Tanenhaus, Chambers & Carlson (1999) and Aparicio, Xiang & Kennedy (2015). We measured the time-course of reference resolution in phrases of the form the Adj Noun while varying whether Adj is relative or absolute, as well as the degree to which the intended referent (target) and a competing object exemplified Adj. We found a contrast-based processing advantage for absolute GAs when the target exemplified Adj imprecisely but the competitor exemplified Adj precisely. However, this advantage was found to be sensitive to the relative/absolute distinction, as well as to the degree to which objects in the display exemplified the relevant scalar property. Collectively, our results provide evidence for a difference in the mental processes underlying relative versus absolute threshold fixing, which we argue is best modeled by a pragmatic theory of imprecision.

What makes a predicate subjective? For example, why is it that (bare) predicates of personal taste like tasty, disgusting and fun are subjective according to certain tests (which we will examine in more detail below), but “phenomenological category” predicates like semantic(al), metaphysical and epistemological are not? To a certain extent at least, this question is independent of the question of how (or whether) subjectivity should be captured by semantic theory, in the sense that any theory that recognizes a subjective/nonsubjective distinction in the first place should be able to say what kinds of features constitute the difference between the subjective and the nonsubjective terms of the language. However, it is often the case that a better understanding of fine-grained details of the lexical semantic properties of particular classes of terms can inform our theoretical understanding and analysis of the categories and constructions that those terms enter into. The aim of this paper is to begin to develop such an understanding. My strategy will be to focus on one empirical domain, scalar predicates, and to look for patterns of distribution and interpretation of expressions that track the subjective/nonsubjective distinction. The conclusion will be that there are (at least) two kinds of subjectivity which are distinguished in that one affects distribution and one does not: subjectivity that is associated with vagueness generally, and subjectivity that is associated with predicates that involve qualitative assessment, independent of vagueness. A caveat: focusing on scalar predicates allows me to carry out a fine-grained examination of lexical semantic details, but it remains to be seen whether the conclusions that I reach about subjectivity in this domain can also help us understand subjectivity in modals, conditionals, and other kinds of constructions.

Both relative adjectives (RAs) like ‘ big ’ and absolute adjectives (AAs) like ‘ empty ’ are sensitive to the context: in the former case, the context determines how much size is required to count as big; in the latter, the context determines how much deviation from total emptiness is allowed to count as empty. Whereas it is generally agreed that the role of context with RAs is to fix the value of a threshold variable, the status of absolute adjective thresholds, and therefore the role of context in their interpretation, remains an object of debate. Some researchers have argued that all gradable adjectives have context-sensitive threshold variables that are assigned values by the same mechanisms ( Lassiter & Goodman 2013 ). Others have claimed that AAs have fixed, endpoint-oriented meanings and that sensitivity to context arises from pragmatic reasoning about imprecision ( Kennedy 2007 ; Syrett, Kennedy & Lidz 2009 ; van Rooij 2011 ; Burnett 2014 ; Qing & Franke 2014 ). In an eye-tracking Visual World experiment, we investigate RAs and AAs used as restrictive modifiers. We find that target identification is significantly faster for both types of adjectives when the visual context supports a restrictive interpretation of the predicate, although this effect is considerably delayed in the case of AAs. We conclude that for RAs, the target facilitation effect is driven by the lexical semantics of the predicate itself. However, it is argued that the extra processing cost observed with AAs results from pragmatic reasoning about imprecision.