Date: April 14 2017
Time: 1:30-3:30
Location: Kresge 3354
Title: The Cognitive Roots of Adjectival Meaning
Abstract: In this paper, I illustrate a way that work in cognitive psychology can
fruitfully interact with truth-conditional semantics. A widely held view takes
the meanings of gradable adjectives to be measure functions, which map objects
to degrees on a scale. Scales come equipped with dimensions that fix what the
degrees are. Following Bartsch and Vennemann, I observe that this allows
dimensions to play the role of lexical roots, that provide the distinctive
contents for each lexical entry. I review evidence that the grammar provides a
limited range of scale structures, presumably dense linear orderings with a
limited range of topological properties. I then turn to how the content of the
root can be fixed. In the verbal domain, there is evidence suggesting roots are
linked to concepts. In many cases for adjectives, it is not concepts but
approximate magnitude representation systems that fix root contents. However,
these magnitude representation systems are approximate or analog, and do not
provide precise values. I argue that the roots of adjectives like these
provide a weak, discrimination-based constraint on a grammatically fixed scale
structure. Other adjectives can find concepts to fix roots, which can support a
well-known equivalence class construction which can fix precise values on a
scale. I conclude that though adjectives have a uniform truth-conditional
semantics, they show substantial differences in the cognitive sources of their
root meanings. This shows that there are (at least) two sub-classes of
adjectives, with roots fixed by different mechanisms and with different degrees
of precision, and showing very different cognitive properties.
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