Formal Semantics, Lexical Semantics, and Compositionality

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Partee, B. H. (2009). Formal Semantics, Lexical Semantics, and Compositionality: The Puzzle of Privative Adjectives, 7(1), 1-24. Retrieved from http://philologia.org.rs/index.php/ph/article/view/216
Details
Title

Formal Semantics, Lexical Semantics, and Compositionality

Subtitle

The Puzzle of Privative Adjectives

Author

Barbara, H, Partee

Journal

Philologia

Volume
Issue

1

Start page

1

End page

24

ISSN

1820-5682

ISBN
DOI
URL

http://philologia.org.rs/index.php/ph/article/view/216

Date

2009-2021/11/08/10:47:20

Abstract

The focus of the paper is the interaction of meaning and context with different kinds of adjectives. Adjective meanings are shown to be more constrained than was appreciated in earlier work. Facts about “NP-splitting” in Polish and Russian cast serious doubt on the standard hierarchy of adjectives, and the data become much more orderly if privative adjectives are reanalyzed as subsective adjectives. This revised account requires the possibility of coerced expansion of the denotation of the noun to which an adjective is applied. Compositionality can be seen as one of the driving forces in such context-sensitive meaning shifts.

Keywords

NP-splits