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Color Adjectives and Absolute Standards: Experimental Evidence| old_uid | 14166 |
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| title | Color Adjectives and Absolute Standards: Experimental Evidence |
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| start_date | 2014/06/13 |
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| schedule | 16h-17h30 |
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| online | no |
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| summary | Gradable adjectives like “long” and “expensive” have played a central role in recent
debates in philosophy over how best to understand the interaction of context and linguistic
meaning. Gradable adjectives are so-called because they can apply to objects in varying
grades or degrees: a lunch can be very long or just fairly long; a weapon system can be
extremely expensive or just mildly expensive. Semanticists have distinguished two types of
gradable adjectives:
relative
adjectives, like “tall” and “expensive” have context sensitive
standards, which objects have to meet or exceed to count as being tall or expensive. In
contrast,
absolute
adjectives like “full” or “spotted” have conventionally fixed standards,
and therefore display less context sensitivity than relative adjectives.
Given that color adjectives are a type of gradable adjective (a car can be “very red”,
“perfectly red”, “completely red”, and so on), are they relative or absolute? If they are ab-
solute adjectives, then they will display less context sensitivity than some theorists have at-
tributed to them (Hansen, 2011; Kennedy and McNally, 2010). It has been argued recently,
on the basis of armchair judgments, that color adjectives are indeed absolute adjectives;
more specifically, they are
minimum-standard
absolute adjectives, which require an object
to possess only a minimum degree of the relevant property for the adjective to apply to
the object (Clapp 2012; see McNally 2011 for a modification of this view). In this paper,
we evaluate whether color adjectives pattern with relative or minimum standard absolute
adjectives by using two different types of tests for evaluating the semantic properties of
gradable adjectives:
Entailment tests (Kennedy 2007, Kennedy and McNally 2005)
The presupposition accommodation test (Syrett et al., 2010)
We are currently developing experiments that apply these tests to color adjectives. We
expect that color adjectives will pattern more closely with relative than absolute gradable
adjectives, and therefore inherit the context sensitivity characteristic of relative adjectives,
contrary to recent claims. We will explain the theoretical background of these tests, discuss
our experimental approach, and present some of our initial findings. |
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| responsibles | Strickland |
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