Abstract
Privative adjectives such as fake have long posed problems to theories of adjectives in a compositional semantics. In this paper, I argue that a theory like Del Pinal’s recent Dual Content semantics, which encodes lexical entries with both an extension-determining component and a conceptual component, is best equipped to account for privativity while maintaining compositionality, but requires some revisions to do so. I provide some novel evidence for this system regarding recursive privativity to justify a new denotation for fake, use this to derive the patterns in some recent experimental data, and introduce an extension to the system to account for privative behaviors of intersective adjectives.
In writing this paper, I am grateful to Kathryn Davidson and the other members of the Meaning & Modality Lab at Harvard for enlightening discussions, the audience at ESSLLI 2018 at the University of Sofía for their valuable questions, and especially the reviewers whose insightful and generously detailed comments have reshaped it so much for the better. As always, all remaining errors are my own.
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Notes
- 1.
Of course, a rich philosophical history also brings with it a deep and heated debate. Holism is not without its critics. Here, we focus on the consequences for privativity, ignoring both Putnam’s arguments against atomism and others’ arguments against dual content-style representations, but an interested reader is pointed to Fodor [4] for these objections, and to Bilgrami [1] for a holistic response.
- 2.
A reviewer points out that, if stone were to be E-structurally specified for its perceptual quale, this analysis would not work. My simple answer to this objection is that stone clearly is not - I don’t think anyone would say that if a stone item were made to look even completely like something else, it would no longer count as stone in the way that it would not were it actually composed of some other material - and were it, then we would probably want to predict a contradiction here. If both \(\beta \) and \(\gamma \) are E-structurally specified for the same quale, then (15) would simply conjoin them and if they are contradictory, we get an infelicitous utterance.
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Martin, J. (2019). Compositionality in Privative Adjectives: Extending Dual Content Semantics. In: Sikos, J., Pacuit, E. (eds) At the Intersection of Language, Logic, and Information. ESSLLI 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11667. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-59620-3_6
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