Fake reefs are sometimes reefs and sometimes not, but are always compositional
Hayley Ross, Najoung Kim, Kathryn Davidson
September 2024 

The semantics of adjective modification often begins with set intersection, such that [[yellow flower]] = [[yellow]] ∩ [[flower]]. Thus a yellow flower is a flower. Such an account, however, runs into problems for adjectives like fake or counterfeit, which display a privative inference: a fake gun is not a gun and a counterfeit dollar is not a dollar. Moreover, recent work shows privativity cannot easily be encoded as a property of specific adjectives like counterfeit, since e.g. counterfeit watch robustly licenses the subsective inference of being a watch (Martin 2022). We gather judgments on nearly 800 adjective-noun bigrams (of which 180 are novel, i.e. zero corpus frequency), and show that privativity depends on the adjective, noun and context, and can be manipulated for the very same adjective-noun bigram by presenting it in different contexts. This poses a challenge for theories which fix privativity as a property of the adjective and always use the same method of composition (Partee 2010, del Pinal 2015). Moreover, we find no difference in participant behavior between novel adjective-noun bigrams and high frequency ones, suggesting that the process is nonetheless compositional and not the result of convention or memorized idiosyncrasy. Our results support compositional accounts like Martin (2022) (which modifies del Pinal 2015) and Guerrini (2024), which treat privativity as context-dependent.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/008012 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Experiments in Linguistic Meaning 3 (2024)
keywords:	adjectives, nouns, compositionality, privativity, entailment, experimental semantics, semantics
previous versions:	v1 [January 2024]
Downloaded:	586 times

 

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