This volume is a collection of papers that examine various aspects of adjectives and adverbs, touching on a variety of syntactic and semantic issues. Most of the papers approach this topic from a semantic point of view, such as the contributions by Marcin Morzycki, Christopher Piñón, or Olivier Bonami & Danièle Godard. These discussions vary widely, and address issues ranging from the interaction of linear order and semantics of adjectival modification to a discussion of lexical semantic and pragmatic properties of evaluative adverbs. Other papers – the first four chapters – lean more towards syntax, and discuss the distributional, ordering and other syntactic properties of adjectives. In spite of this variation, which is also reflected in the summaries that follow, some generalizations emerge from the papers. Concerning syntax, the accounts argue for a ‘free’ structure, where adjectival distribution is not explicitly and independently restricted, in contrast with a cartographic approach. The semantic discussions – in addition to specifying the semantic and pragmatic properties of various classes of modifiers – often revolve around scalarity or the role of discourse properties. A brief summary of each chapter is given below.
The first chapter, ‘Introduction’, by Louise McNally & Christopher Kennedy, offers an overview of some recurring issues in the generative treatment of adjective and adverbs, as well as a summary of the papers contained in the book.
The second chapter, ‘The position of adjectives and other phrasal modifiers in the decomposition of DP’, by Peter Svenonius, considers the functional structure and adjective positions within Determiner Phrases (DPs) cross-linguistically. First, Svenonius establishes the range and hierarchy of functional heads (including articles, plural heads, and various classifiers) by building on data from a wealth of languages. He assumes that the postulated ordering is constant across languages; cross-linguistic variation arises from different movement operations and possible cluster formation of adjacent functional heads. As for adjective ordering, Svenonius suggests that it is not necessary to assume a detailed, fine-structured functional hierarchy which is specific to adjectives. In contrast with the cartographic approach of Scott (Reference Scott and Cinque2002), many restrictions on adjective ordering are argued to reduce to the independently motivated functional hierarchy. The position of focused, idiomatic, intersective and subsective adjectives, for instance, can be intuitively identified with and related to such positions. Svenonius notes that the ‘fixed’ ordering of adjectives arises from the ordering in the basic hierarchical structure and from the avoidance of adjective iteration within a single layer/projection. In a number of cases the ordering can still be flexible (e.g. long thick rope/thick long rope) – a fact that is surprising from a cartographic point of view but expected given the approach advocated here.
The third chapter is by Richard Larson & Hiroko Yamakido, on ‘Ezafe and the deep position of nominal modifiers’. Building on the DP-shell structure proposed in Larson (Reference Larson2000), the authors explore an account of the Ezafe morpheme (an element linking nouns and postnominal modifiers in Farsi, Kurmanji and Zazaki) as a Case licensor. They argue that modifiers are generated in postnominal positions universally. Some modifiers – including adjectives and some Prepositional Phrases – must be Case-marked; this requirement may be satisfied by modifier movement to a higher Case-checking position within the DP. Alternatively, Ezafe can check the Case of the postnominal modifier, permitting the modifier to surface in situ. In addition to accounting for the properties and consequences of Ezafe, the paper offers extensions to postnominal modifiers in English (someone tall) and Greek, as well as to prenominal modifiers in Japanese.
In the fourth chapter, entitled ‘Meaning-form correlations and adjective position in Spanish’, Violeta Demonte establishes a classification and an account of predicative and non-predicative adjectives in Spanish. She presents a range of diagnostics – including syntactic position and restrictive interpretation – that distinguish these two types of adjectives. She notes that prenominal adjectival position correlates with non-predicative interpretation, which maps properties of individuals to properties of individuals. Postnominal adjectives, in contrast, are predicative; they denote properties of individuals. Demonte argues that the distinction between the two classes of adverbs is easily captured within a Minimalist framework: (a) non-predicative adjectives are Pair-merged to nP, the maximal projection of a light n head, while (b) predicative adjectives are externally Merged with NP (the head noun N moves to the higher n head, resulting in postnominal adjective position). The third type of Merge, internal Merge, derives focused adjectives, where the adjective is remerged in a Focus phrase, which dominates nP. The three types of Merge operations thus naturally derive the three clusters of semantic and syntactic properties of adjectives.
Marcin Morzycki considers nonrestrictive modifiers in ‘Nonrestrictive modifiers in non-parenthetical constructions’. He attempts to derive a linear restriction on these modifiers: nonrestrictive interpretation in the absence of a parenthetical intonation is possible only in positions preceding the head. The generalization applies to adjectives and adverbs alike (cf. Every (reprehensible) war crime (#reprehensible) should be prosecuted, where the postnominal adjective only permits a restrictive interpretation). Morzycki points out that nonrestrictive modifiers involve not descriptive, but rather expressive meaning, i.e. essentially the speaker's commentary on what is being said. Following Potts (Reference Potts2005), he adopts a two-dimensional semantics, where expressive meaning and descriptive meaning are computed by different rules and are represented separately. Morzycki proposes a rule specific to the expressive dimension, the Expressive Predicate Modification rule, which explicitly imposes linear order: it specifies that the descriptive content is supplied by the constituent on the right (i.e. by war crimes in reprehensible war crimes). More generally, he opens up the possibility of a non-descriptive dimension in a multidimensional semantics – a dimension of expressive meaning, focus or scalar implicatures – being distinct from the descriptive dimension in referring to linear order.
In ‘Adjectives and degree modification’, Jenny Doetjes explores the relationship between adjectives and degree expressions. The relationship bears on the question of whether gradability is a defining property of adjectives. Doetjes first presents an in-depth classification of degree expressions from English, French, Dutch and German. She shows that these expressions fall into seven distinct groups, most of which can appear with categories other than adjectives. Doetjes then considers several possibilities which build on the presence of a degree variable to account for the distribution of degree expressions both within and across these languages. She argues that none of these is successful, and proposes that the characterization must appeal to scalar structures. It is not a degree argument, but open scales and relative standards that are typically adjectival. Degree modifiers are sensitive to properties of scales (cf. Kennedy & McNally Reference Kennedy and Louise2005), and the distinct types of scales associated with adjectives and nouns (open and lower closed scale, respectively) yield the distribution of different degree modifiers. Doetjes also notes some diachronic points, including the possible transitional nature of French très ‘very’ and the generalization that the degree interpretation of ambiguous expressions like more (cf. more ambitious) developed from a quantifier use (more ambition).
The seventh chapter, ‘Measure of change: The adjectival core of degree achievements’, by Christopher Kennedy & Beth Levin, addresses predicates of variable telicity. The authors discuss degree achievements – including cool, dry, darken – in detail. They propose a treatment of these predicates where the adjectival core of the achievement verbs is a special kind of measure function, which measures the degree to which an object changes along a scale in the course of the event. Atelic interpretations arise under ‘comparative’ truth conditions, where the affected argument undergoes some change in the property measured. This requires a standard of comparison that is based on the minimal element on the scale. If the relevant scale has a maximal element, then basing the standard of comparison on the maximal element yields a telic interpretation. Some degree achievements, including widen and deepen, lack a telic interpretation because the associated scale does not have a maximal element. The account offered by Kennedy & Levin is novel in that it adopts a scalar semantics for gradable adjectives, and assumes that this underlies the measure of change functions of degree achievements. The differences among the scale structures of adjectives are thus naturally reflected in differences among the degree achievements as well.
Christopher Piñón's contribution, ‘Aspectual composition with degrees’, is a formal discussion of issues related to the preceding paper. Piñón considers how the properties described as telicity/atelicity are determined, based on the properties of the predicate and its arguments. The predicates focused on in this chapter are incremental theme predicates (e.g. eat, write), where the telicity is affected by the properties of the theme argument (compare eat bread and eat the bread). Piñón argues that incremental theme verbs are gradable and have a degree argument. More specifically, for the incremental degree verb eat, there is an incremental degree function eat δ, which measures the degree to which the theme x, as an individual of type O, is eaten in the course of an event e. The adoption of the predicate O(bject) permits specifying a tighter connection between the incremental theme argument and the gradable property. Piñón makes this connection explicit and provides a number of axioms and some derivations to illustrate. He further notes that this approach can carry over to degree achievements as well. The distinction between degree achievements and incremental theme verbs, then, is not due to whether a degree argument is available. Rather, degree achievements have an extent argument, which incremental theme verbs lack.
Graham Katz discusses ‘Manner modification of state verbs’. He argues that apparent cases of manner modification of state verbs do not warrant a Davidsonian analysis of these verbs, where the predicate would be associated with an underlying eventuality argument. Katz first clarifies the items under discussion by identifying the core state verbs, and discussing manner modifiers in more detail. He points out, for instance, that the entailments often taken to characterize true Davidsonian manner modification (Landman's (Reference Landman2000) Permutation, Drop and Non-entailment) also hold for some mathematical relations which clearly do not involve event predication. Examples of apparent manner modification of core state verbs fall into various categories, according to Katz. The modifiers may be part of a collocation and receive idiomatic interpretation (e.g. love deeply), or they may modify a scalar property of the predicate, shifting a contextually determined standard (e.g. know French well). To account for examples such as love passionately, Katz adopts the type of predicate that Chierchia (Reference Chierchia, Carlson and Pelletier1995) proposes for generic predicates. In Peter loves Mary passionately, the manner adverb modifies a set of events that are related to this state, or that reflect this state. Manner modification of state verbs thus does not support eventuality arguments for these predicates.
In ‘Towards flexible types with constraints for manner and factive adverbs’, Adam Zachary Wyner argues for a flexible account of adverb positions. He discusses manner and factive adverbs in detail, and proposes that both classes of adverbs have flexible types. Their distribution is not fixed or explicitly restricted. The syntactic type of the adverbs (as well as their position within the clause) is flexible, while their semantic interpretation remains the same. The relative ordering among the adverbs, however, is strict: manner adverbs must follow factive adverbs. In Wyner's system, this follows from the semantics of the adverbs; both kinds of adverbs have an event argument predicate, but factive adverbs introduce existential closure over the argument, making it unavailable for further modification. Wyner also explores a Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) approach to parallels between intra- and intersentential factive and manner adverbs. He argues that the same discourse-related processes affect the distribution and interpretation of adverbs across sentences as within sentences – they determine whether there is an available entity of the appropriate semantic type that the adverb can predicate of. While this approach raises questions about the DRT mechanisms that extend to intrasentential relations, it shows the superiority of the flexible approach, which does not assume syntactic restrictions on the adverbs.
In chapter 11, ‘Lexical semantics and pragmatics of evaluative adverbs’, Olivier Bonami & Danièle Godard discuss the semantic and pragmatic properties of evaluative adjectives, focusing on data concerning French adjectives (e.g. bizarre ‘strange’) and adverbs (bizarrement ‘strangely’). They argue that evaluative elements do not add to the main content; rather, they affect the discourse structure directly. By asserting evaluative p, the speaker is committed to p, but does not enter p in the set of questions under discussion; consequently, the addressee will not evaluate p. The authors show that in spite of their similar effect on discourse, evaluative adjective and adverbs pattern differently with respect to presuppositions and the interpretation of conditionals. Bonami & Godard argue that the difference arises from the universal closure and conditional semantics characterizing evaluative adverbs but not their adjectival counterparts. The paper also provides a Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar fragment accounting for the syntax and semantics of evaluative adverbs. Finally, Bonami & Godard comment on issues arising at the interfaces, considering both evaluatives in interrogatives and evaluatives in non-sentence-initial positions and their interaction with prosody and scope.
The last chapter, by Gina Taranto, considers ‘Discourse adjectives’ such as apparent, obvious or clear. Taranto argues that discourse adjectives do not add new information to the common ground in the discourse but are a means of commenting on the conversation itself. In support of this claim, she shows that these adjectives are not factive (but have a factive flavor, which is derived from specific discourse considerations), and that they require some experiencer argument, which is identified with the discourse participants by default. A successful treatment of discourse adjectives requires more than a homogeneous treatment of the common ground; the public commitments of the speaker and the addressee must be distinguished. In such a theory of discourse, discourse adjectives can be characterized as expressing purely metalinguistic meaning. For a proposition p, clearly p asserts that the discourse participants believe that there is a high probability that p, in light of the available evidence.
As reflected in the above summaries, the papers in this volume explore a wide variety of issues related to the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of adjectives and adverbs. As such, they hold interest for semanticists, syntacticians and other theoretical linguists alike.
