We are happy to announce a talk by Carolin Reinert (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium.
The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301.
Title: The compositionality of adjective noun constructions – Investigating the comparison property of skillful-type adjectives
Date: June 23
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct
Abstract:
In the last talk I gave in the colloquium, I addressed the core assumption of my thesis, namely that skillful-type adjectives – apart from being dependent on a comparison class, which makes them similar to tall-type adjectives – are dependent on an additional parameter, a comparison property. Given a value for these parameters, skillful-type adjectives turn out to be complex predicates after all, not modifiers, and therefore are able to combine with the noun via Intersection. I argued for a “context dependence only” approach to adjective denotations.
In this talk, I will present the next chapter of my thesis. I will address further issues in connection with the comparison property of skillful-type adjectives and will argue that the comparison property is present as an actual argument to the adjective, not as a metasemantic factor. In this light, I will consider ways in which a spell-out of the parameter can occur (skillful as a teacher, skillful at teaching) and contrast them with adjective noun constructions (skillful teacher). Furthermore, I will consider constructions with ing-forms in this connection (skillful teaching), which at first sight seem to challenge the assumption that the noun in an adjective noun construction is not a spell-out of the adjective’s parameter.