We are happy to announce a talk by Janek Guerrini (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium.
The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301.
If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.
Date: October 24, 2024
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t.
Title:
Color adjectives: insights from Italian
Abstract:
When post-nominal, Italian adjectives have the range of readings that is familiar from English: ‘red pen’ may denote a red-inked pen, or a pen with a red outer surface. When pre-nominal, instead, Italian color adjectives can only target the visible part of objects denoted by the noun they modify – ‘penna rossa’ (‘red pen’, pre-nominal) can only denote a pen with a red outer surface. In this work, I argue that this systematic grammatical behavior is hard to account on most extant accounts of color adjective composition. I present a compositional analysis in the spirit of Szabó (2001), capturing both the context-sensitivity and the systematicity of color adjectives. In my approach, color adjectives have a property slot that can be filled contextually in general, but must be filled by a property identical to the one provided by the input noun in Italian pre- nominal position – an assumption independently justified by other work on Italian pre-nominal adjectives, cf. Cinque (2014). I show how this explains the pattern for Italian. I also argue that the core meaning of color adjectives is in fact qualitative, and that a layer bearing on ‘quantity of color’ applies on top of the core meaning, just like it does with many other kinds of adjectives. In line with a consistent but separated body of work, I take ‘quantity of color’ to be linked to the more general phenomena of predicate homogeneity and non-maximality and their removal (cf. Löbner, 2000; Paillé, 2022, among many others). Finally, I account for the fact that color adjectives seem to only target external subparts of objects, while other adjectives like ‘sweet’ intuitively target all of the relevant subparts: an apple that is ‘red and sweet’ is an apple whose surface is red, and whose every subpart is sweet.