Abstract
Adjectives are typically felicitous in within-predicate comparisons— constructions of the form ‘X is more A than y’, as in This is bigger than that, but are often infelicitous in between-predicate comparisons—‘X is more A than (y is) B’, as in *Tweety is bigger than (it is) heavy. Nouns, by contrast, exhibit the inverse pattern. The challenge is to account for the felicity of between-noun comparisons, such as more a duck than a goose, while capturing the infelicity of within-noun comparisons, such as #This bird is more a duck than that one. Postulating even only ad hoc, meta-linguistic gradable interpretations for noun to capture the meaning of between-noun comparisons results in wrong predictions for within-noun comparisons and other gradable constructions (#very duck; too duck). To address this challenge, the paper exploits the psychological notion of a contrast-set. The solution correctly predicts inference patterns and truth value judgments.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Logic, Language, and Computation - 10th International Tbilisi Symposium on Logic, Language, and Computation, TbiLLC 2013, Revised Selected Papers |
Editors | Martin Aher, Daniel Hole, Emil Jerabek, Clemens Kupke |
Publisher | Springer Verlag |
Pages | 276-289 |
Number of pages | 14 |
ISBN (Print) | 9783662469057 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 2015 |
Event | 10th International Tbilisi Symposium on Logic, Language, and Computation, TbiLLC 2013 - Gudauri, Georgia Duration: 23 Sep 2013 → 27 Sep 2013 |
Publication series
Name | Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) |
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Volume | 8984 |
ISSN (Print) | 0302-9743 |
ISSN (Electronic) | 1611-3349 |
Conference
Conference | 10th International Tbilisi Symposium on Logic, Language, and Computation, TbiLLC 2013 |
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Country/Territory | Georgia |
City | Gudauri |
Period | 23/09/13 → 27/09/13 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015.
Keywords
- Adjective
- Comparison
- Contrast set
- Dimension
- Gradability
- Noun