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: Investigating local readings of adjectives
Date: April 27, 2023
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct
Abstract:
In this talk, I would like to report on the last chapter of my dissertation.
In my dissertation I investigate the hypothesis that all adjective noun constructions involving local adjectives can be interpreted intersectively. This excludes non-local readings allowed by certain adnominal adjectives like possible, wrong and occasional (Larson, 2000; Schwarz 2006, 2020; Morzycki 2016). In previous talks in the colloquium, I addressed certain aspects of adjectives like skillful and argued for an analysis of these adjectives as context-dependent predicates. As a result, an intersective analysis is possible for such adjectives. However, there are further types of adjectives that are also local (in the sense of Schwarz 2020), but cannot receive an intersective analysis: temporal adjectives like former and modal adjectives like alleged. In this talk, I will therefore investigate former and alleged further and work with the observation that temporal and modal adjectives have different scoping abilities inside the DP than other local adjectives. This becomes apparent in the ambiguity of possessive constructions such as Mary’s former mansion (Partee&Borchev 2005; Larson&Cho 2003). I will eventually suggest an analysis of temporal and modal adjectives as sentence adverbs. As a result, it turns out that either local adjectives can be interpreted intersectively, or underlyingly they are in fact not adjectival, but adverbial.