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Vagueness - extended version
Abstract
This is a considerably extended version of the chapter "Vagueness" in Maria Aloni and Paul Dekker (Eds.) Cambridge Handbook of Formal Semantic, Cambridge.
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An argument for, and account of linguistic universals in the morphology of comparison, combining empirical breadth and theoretical rigor.
This groundbreaking study of the morphology of comparison yields a surprising result: that even in suppletion (the wholesale replacement of one stem by a phonologically unrelated stem, as in good-better-best) there emerge strikingly robust patterns, virtually exceptionless generalizations across languages. Jonathan David Bobaljik describes the systematicity in suppletion, and argues that at least five generalizations are solid contenders for the status of linguistic universals. The major topics discussed include suppletion, comparative and superlative formation, deadjectival verbs, and lexical decomposition. Bobaljik's primary focus is on morphological theory, but his argument also aims to integrate evidence from a variety of subfields into a coherent whole.
In the course of his analysis, Bobaljik argues that the assumptions needed bear on choices among theoretical frameworks and that the framework of Distributed Morphology has the right architecture to support the account. In addition to the theoretical implications of the generalizations, Bobaljik suggests that the striking patterns of regularity in what otherwise appears to be the most irregular of linguistic domains provide compelling evidence for Universal Grammar.
The book strikes a unique balance between empirical breadth and theoretical detail. The phenomenon that is the main focus of the argument, suppletion in adjectival gradation, is rare enough that Bobaljik is able to present an essentially comprehensive description of the facts; at the same time, it is common enough to offer sufficient variation to explore the question of universals over a significant dataset of more than three hundred languages.
First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
This monograph presents a new theory of the relationship between vagueness, context sensitivity, gradability, and scale structure in natural language. The book argues that particular subclasses of adjectival predicates (relative adjectives (i.e. tall), total adjectives (i.e. dry), partial adjectives (i.e. wet), and non-scalar adjectives (i.e. hexagonal)) can be distinguished through looking how their criteria of application can vary depending on context; how they display the characteristic properties of vague language; and what the properties of their associated orders (a.k.a. scales) are. It has been known for a long time that there exist empirical connections between context sensitivity, vagueness, and scale structure in the adjectival domain; however, a formal system that expresses these connections has yet to be developed. By combining insights into the relationship between context sensitivity and gradability from the Delineation semantics framework with insights into the relationship between tolerance relations and the Sorites paradox from the Tolerant, Classical, Strict non-classical framework, the book proposes such a logical system (called DelTCS). Using this framework, it is shown that the association of particular classes of adjectives with their particular kinds of scales can be derived from their context sensitivity and vagueness properties. In the second part of the book, it gives a mereological extension of DelTCS to analyze vagueness and gradability outside the adjectival domain. It is shown that there exist correspondences between the major adjectival scale structure classes and certain well-known subclasses of determiner phrases, and the book shows how these correspondences can be captured within this system.
This chapter is about vagueness in natural language semantics. More specifically, we discuss lexical means of making vague assertions more or less precise in compositional semantics. Examples of expressions that have this effect are approximately, absolutely, definitely, and roughly speaking. While many of these expressions are modifiers and adverbs, some such expressions are neither. Hence, for the purposes of this chapter we call expressions that make vague assertions more or less precise approximators. Our main claim is that the distribution of such expressions provides evidence for the view that vagueness in language comes in at least two varieties, which we call scalar vagueness and epistemic vagueness.