Marcin Morzycki

Papers etc.

There are links to individual BibTeX files for each item below, but you can also get everything as one massive file, if for some reason you want such a thing. Some items are listed by manuscript date rather than publication date.

• 2024. With Starr Sandoval, Rose Underhill, and Hary Chow. ‘Zero and the Grammar of Absence’. Slides for a talk at the workshop ‘Modification and (Non-)Existence Entailing Predicates’, Ruhr-Universität Bochum. BibTeX

  What does it mean to modify an expression with the word ‘zero’, as in ‘Zero capybaras arrived’? One leading idea (Bylinina & Nouwen 2018) is that ‘zero’ is like other numerals and that it introduces existential quantification over plural individuals whose cardinality is 0, i.e., null individuals. The aim of this talk is in part to bring crosslinguistic evidence to bear on this idea, exploring the grammar of zero in Cantonese and in Ktunaxa, an endangered languages spoken in parts of Canada and the US. Intriguingly, Ktunaxa expresses zero with a predicate of absence (roughly, ‘that which is absent’). This will lead us to reflect on predicating absence more generally as a species of negative existential.

• 2024. With Adam Gobeski. ‘Ranges and Paths’. Manuscript. BibTeX

  Range expressions such as between 3 and 8, from 3 to 8, and 3 through 8 resemble modified numerals such as at least 3 and have sometimes been mentioned under that rubric. This paper shows that they are crucially different in their distribution, the readings available to them, and their behavior with respect to quantifiers, and more generally that they have an intricate grammar of their own. We distinguish three classes of readings they can receive: singleton punctual readings, on which they often give rise to ignorance inferences; set punctual readings, which arise chiefly in the scope of quantifiers; and interval readings, where the range is interpreted exhaustively. The heart of the semantics of range expressions, we suggest, is the notion of paths, generalized from its use in the analysis of locatives to extend across semantic types.

• 2024. ‘The Definiteness of Manners and Reasons’. Squib. In Ryan Bochnak, Eva Csipak, Lisa Matthewson, Marcin Morzycki, and Daniel Reisinger, eds. The Title of This Volume is Shorter Than Its Contributions Are Allowed To Be: Papers in Honour of Hotze Rullmann. UBC Working Papers in Linguistics. BibTeX

  Reference to reasons and manners is often achieved with definite descriptions: the reason she did it, the way she did it. That’s surprising, because there is typically more than one reason for an event and more than one manner in which it took place. This squib proposes that this is because manner and reason are content-bearing nouns, like claim or suggestion, and they inherit certain crucial mereological properties from the structure of their content.

• 2024. With Starr Sandoval. ‘Event Readings of Nouns, Mass Terms, and Bare Singulars in English’. Manuscript, UBC. BibTeX

  Eventive readings of non-eventive nominals are systematically possible in English in more or less arbitrary argument positions, we will show, when the noun belongs to a narrow but productive class that includes terms for games and musical instruments—and in the right discourse contexts, other nouns too. On the object reading, these nouns are count, but on the eventive reading, they are necessarily semantically mass. These readings are also possible under a wide variety of determiners. They can even be expressed with bare singular DP arguments, which are of course not generally possible in English. We treat these uses as the result of a semantic shift that approximates the the effects of gerundive nominalization: for example, it may map piano to something like ’piano playing’. Building on previous work Greeson et al. (to appear), we demonstrate that these assumptions—along with typical assumptions about kind reference and event kinds—make possible an explanation of the curious behavior of definite descriptions and bare singulars with play (e.g. play (the) piano). That includes finer-grained facts about kind reference, event kinds, adverbial readings of adjectives, and classificatory/relational adjectives (i.e. subkind modifiers).

• 2023. With Adam Gobeski. ‘Composite Measure Phrases and Specialized Measurement’. Manuscript, UBC. BibTeX

  Purely numerical measure phrases (MPs) that lack a unit term—such as three or two thirds—are normally treated as denoting degrees on a single shared numerical scale. This paper examines an apparently unrecognized class of complex purely numerical MPs including two in three and six to one, which we term ‘composite MPs’ because they have other MPs as subconstituents. They demonstrate, we argue, that mathematically equivalent MPs aren’t equivalent in their distribution and in their semantics. These differences can be related to restrictions on what sort of objects different MPs can measure. They can be captured by enriching the theoretical notion of degrees with tropes (as advocated in a line of work by Friederike Moltmann). Some MPs, such as sports scores, require taking a further step: embracing tuples of degrees as a sort of degree. We classify composite MPs into three varieties, provide diagnostics for each of them. The inquiry has ramifications for broader questions about the relationship between the facts of the world and how they are encoded in language.

• 2023/to appear. With Starr Sandoval. ‘A Modal Analysis of Propositional “How”’. In Proceedings of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL) 41. BibTeX

  This paper motivates a modal analysis of propositional how, which occurs in questions that ask for explanations such as `How are you not cold right now?’ (Jaworski 2009, Pak 2017}. Building on Pak 2017, we show propositional how behaves differently from manner how with respect to embedding, negative islands, stative predicates, and modals. Furthermore, it contrasts with why in its incredulity flavor and interaction with modals.

• 2022/in press. With Daniel Greeson and Starr Sandoval. ‘Instrument Terms, Bare Singulars, and Event Kinds’. Proceedings of the Chicago Linguistics Society (CLS) 55. BibTeX

  Bare plurals and definite descriptions are the canonical tools for achieving kind reference in English. Our focus is an additional tool that is perhaps more theoretically surprising: bare singulars that characterize musical instruments. These occur notably as arguments of verbs like play and learn, but also in argument positions more widely. This puzzle can be understood, we suggest, if these bare singulars are taken to be, essentially, mass terms for Carlsonian kinds of events. This interacts with independent properties of definite descriptions, adjectival modification, and a light-verb form of play to yield an intricate constellation of effects, including restrictions on the availability of adverbial readings of adjectives (Stump 1985, Larson 1999, Gehrke & McNally 2015, and many others).

  A more fully developed analysis with broader empirical coverage can be found here.

• 2022. With Hary Chow. ‘Zero, Null Individuals, and Nominal Semantics in Cantonese’. In Nicole Dreier, Chloe Kwon, Thomas Darnell, and John Starr, eds. Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 31. BibTeX

  It has been convincingly argued that English zero provides evidence for introducing null individuals into the ontology of natural language (Bylinina & Nouwen 2018). We examine `zero’ in Cantonese, where it provides evidence that such null individuals are a matter of crosslinguistic variation. Cantonese zero has a more restricted distribution. It occurs widely in a number of contexts, but it is systematically ruled out with ordinary classifiers. These facts, coupled with assumptions about the nature of measurement and nominal semantics, demonstrate despite its extensive use in the language, zero is impossible in precisely the uses that require null individuals. Cantonese seems to be telling us that such null individuals are simply absent from its ontology, implying an interesting difference in natural language metaphysics between the languages—and perhaps a different perspective on what theoretical shape crosslinguistic variation can take.

• 2022. With Adam Gobeski. ‘Composite Measure Phrases: Odds, Scores, Flavors of Scales, and the Taxonomy of MPs’. In Daniel Gutzmann and Sophie Repp, eds. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 26. BibTeX

  Purely numerical measure phrases (MPs) like three or two thirds, which lack a unit term, are often construed as denoting degrees on a single numerical scale. This paper examines an apparently unrecognized class of complex purely numerical MPs such as two in three and six to one, which we term composite MPS. Such MPs demonstrate, we argue, that mathematically equivalent MPs aren’t always equivalent linguistically and that different purely mathematical MPs refer to degrees on different and incommensurable scales. Indeed, some, such as sports scores, seem to refer irreducibly to tuples or pluralities of degrees. We classify composite MPs into three varieties, each of which requires a distinct analysis.

• 2021/2024. With Rose Underhill. ‘Single: Exhaustivity, Scalarity, and Nonlocal Adjectives’. In Proceedings of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL) 39. Cascadilla Press. BibTeX

  We provide a semantics for the adjective single and ultimately related expressions. Single manifests a curious pattern of interpretations that, we argue, sheds light on how adjectives get nonlocal readings, exhaustivity effects, and the semantics of groups. More precisely, we will argue that on its most salient reading single is, like occasional, a nonlocal adjective in the sense of Schwarz (2006, ta) and others, receiving sentential scope. Its core lexical semantics includes an exhaustivity component that generates an ‘exactly’ interpretation in general and an ‘even’-like one in downward entailing contexts. Another ingredient of its meaning makes use of groups (in the sense of Barker 1992, Landman 1989) in an unusual way: via one-membered singleton groups, which give rise not to collective predication, but a pragmatic structuring the domain of individuals in a given context. Additionally, single has a distinct meaning that is part of the same paradigm as double and triple, with its own distribution. While we assign this meaning a separate denotation, it similarly structures the sub-atomic domain relative to a given context.

• 2020. ‘Structure and Ontology in Nonlocal Readings of Adjectives’. In Thomas Gamerschlag and Sebastian Löbner (eds.), Cognitive Structures: Linguistic, Philosophical, and Psychological Perspectives. Springer, Dordrecht. BibTeX

  In certain uses, adjectives appear to make the semantic contribution normally associated with adverbs. These readings are often thought to be a peripheral phenomenon, restricted to one corner of the grammar and just a handful of lexical items. I’ll argue that it’s actually considerably more general than is often recognized, and that it admits two fundamentally different modes of explanation: in terms of the syntactic machinery that undergirds these structures and in terms of the ontology of the objects manipulated by its semantics. Both modes of explanation have been suggested for some of the puzzles in this domain, and I’ll argue both are necessary. With respect to adjectives including average and occasional, the key insight is that their lexical semantics is fundamentally about kinds. But to arrive at a more general theory of adverbial readings, it is also necessary to further articulate the compositional semantics. In this spirit, I’ll argue that these adjectives actually have the semantic type of quantificational determiners like every. If this way of thinking about adverbial readings is on the right track, it instantiates a means by which these two distinct modes of explanation—and the distinct aspects of cognition they may ultimately be associated with—both play a crucial role in bringing about the apparently aberrant behavior of this class of adjectives.

  (This is a more developed descendant of Toward a General Theory of Nonlocal Readings of Adjectives below, pitched in a different way in an attempt to be useful to a broader audience that includes non-linguists. That’s the intended audience of the volume.)

• 2020. ‘Gradable Adjectives and Degree Expressions’. In Lisa Matthewson, Cécile Meier, Hotze Rullmann, and Thomas Ede Zimmermann, eds. The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Semantics. Wiley Blackwell. BibTeX

• 2020/to appear. ‘Semantic Viruses and Multiple Superlatives’. In Proceedings of the Chicago Linguistics Society (CLS) 54. BibTeX

  We don’t immediately perceive the interpretation of sentences with multiple superlatives as particularly complicated. Their most natural reading involves a claim of having struck a balance between two different qualities. It’s not clear that standard accounts of superlatives (such as Szabolsci 1986, Heim 1999, Sharvit & Stateva 2002) suffice to deliver quite this reading in a way that does it justice and distinguishes it from those of similar sentences we perceive as distinct. The other striking property of such sentences is that the relevant reading seems brittle and unsteady—revealingly so. This papers considers the possibility that these facts are an instance of a broader phenomenon: semantic viruses. Sobin (1994, 1997) and Lasnik & Sobin (2000) proposed that certain syntactic processes should be regarded as what they called grammatical viruses, rules that operate outside the grammar. They suggested that these rules are generally complicated, consciously acquired, and awkwardly half-internalized. If the syntax can be infected in this way, it stands to reason that the semantics might be as well. I argue that it may be.

• 2018. With Adam Gobeski. ‘Percentages, Relational Degrees, and Degree Constructions’. In Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 27. Dan Burgdorf, Jacob Collar, Sireemas Maspong, and Brynhildur Stefánsdóttir. BibTeX

  Comparatives and equatives are usually assumed to differ only in that comparatives require that one degree be greater than another, while equatives require that it be at least as great. Unexpectedly, though, the interpretation of percentage measure phrases differs fundamentally between the constructions. This curious asymmetry is, we suggest, revealing. It demonstrates that comparatives and equatives are not as similar as one might have thought. We propose an analysis of these facts in which the interpretation of percentage phrases follows straightforwardly from standard assumptions enriched with two additional ones: that percentage phrases denote ‘relational degrees’ (type <d,d>) and that the equative morpheme is uninterpreted.

• 2018. ‘Degrees as Kinds, Degrees Across Scales, and Correlative Constructions’. Slides for a talk at the workshop ‘Reference beyond the DP: Towards a Crosslinguistic Typology of the Syntax and Semantics of Proforms’, Deutschen Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft (DGfS). University of Stuttgart. BibTeX

  Among the more intuitively appealing and elegant ideas in the analysis of adjectives is that they denote measure functions (Kennedy 1999). But as Bale 2007 pointed out, conjoined adjectives are problematic for this view. He, Schwarz 2010, Schwarzschild 2013, and have wrestled with the thorny issue of how to conjoin adjectival scales in ways that ultimately bear on the nature of degrees. In this talk I’ll consider how this problem might be approached if degrees are understood in terms of kinds, and what that might predict about anaphora to conjoined adjectives (e.g. Donald is ignorant and unpleasant, and his son even more so).

• 2017. ‘Some Viruses in the Semantics’. In Nicholas LaCara, Keir Moulton, and Anne-Michelle Tessier, eds. A Schrift to Fest Kyle Johnson. University of Massachusetts Linguistics Open Access Publications. BibTeX

  Sobin (1994, 1997) proposed that certain syntactic processes should be regarded as what he called grammatical viruses, rules that operate outside the grammar and that are the result of a prescriptive rule—consciously acquired, awkwardly half-internalized. If the syntax can be infected in this way, it stands to reason that the semantics might be as well. I argue here that it may be. The potential viruses I’ll examine are the word respectively, factor/ratio phrases, and certain mathematical expressions such as zero (Bylinina & Nouwen 2017). Even in the absence of a fully-developed theory of viruses, the benefit of recognizing viruses is, first, that doing so may account for empirical differences between viruses and the ordinary grammar, and, second, that it may simplify the grammar significantly.

• 2016. ‘Toward a General Theory of Nonlocal Readings of Adjectives’. In Nadine Bade, Polina Berezovskaya, and Anthea Schöller, eds. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 20. Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen. BibTeX

  Adverbial readings of adjectives (as in The occasional sailor strolled by) have been a longstanding curiosity, but are often thought peripheral and idiosyncratic. This paper argues that such nonlocal readings are both more common and more systematic than previously recognized. The empirical aim here is to demonstrate that despite some real idiosyncrasies, the regularities are sufficient to require a unified account. Adjectives that give rise to these readings fall into three classes distinguished by the restrictions they impose on the quantificational force of their determiner. These restrictions and the unexpected wide scope of the adjective can both be explained by assuming that the relevant adjectives are quantificational, trigger QR from inside the DP, and leave behind a type-shifted trace.

  

• 2016. Modification. A book (now available in reasonably-priced paperback!) for the Cambridge University Press series Key Topics in Semantics and Pragmatics. BibTeX

  This is something between an advanced textbook for people who already have a background in semantics and a survey of work on the semantics of adjectives, adverbs, and degrees. Here’s a pdf of the full manuscript of a non-final draft and you can also download several chapters individually.

• 2015. ‘Eventualities and Differential Measurement’. Slides for a talk at a workshop on event semantics, Stuttgart. BibTeX

• 2015. With Curt Anderson. ‘Degrees as Kinds’. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. Here’s a near-final draft of the manuscript. You can also look at slides for a talk about this, presented in different versions at Ohio State, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Calgary. (This differs substantially from an earlier incarnation at the 2011 Workshop on Modification With and Without Modifiers in Madrid.) BibTeX

  This paper argues that a variety of constructions in a variety of languages suggest a deep connection between kinds, manners, and degrees. We articulate a way of thinking about degrees on which this connection is less surprising, rooted in the idea that degrees are kinds of Davidsonian states. This enables us to provide a cross-categorial compositional semantics for a class of expressions that are can serve as anaphors to kinds, manners, and degrees, and can introduce clauses that further characterize them. This puts equatives in a new light: as a special case of a cross-categorial phenomenon. Our analysis of these constructions builds on independently motivated assumptions about free relatives and type shifting. This provides evidence for a view of degrees on which they are significantly more ontologically complex than is standardly assumed.

• 2014. ‘Where Does Nominal Gradability Come From?’. Slides for an updated and slightly more speculative version of ‘The Origins of Nominal Gradability’ immediately below, presented at the University of Massachusetts. BibTeX

• 2013. ‘The Origins of Nominal Gradability’. Talk presented at Georgetown University and Wayne State University. Elaborates on ‘The Several Faces of Adnominal Degree Modification’. BibTeX

• 2011. ‘The Several Faces of Adnominal Degree Modification’. Appeared in 2012 in the Proceedings of the 29th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL). Jaehoon Choi, E. Alan Hogue, Jeffrey Punske, Deniz Tat, Jessamyn Schertz, and Alex Trueman, eds. Cascadilla Press, Somerville, Mass. BibTeX

  This paper argues that adnominal degree modifiers differ from their more familiar adjectival cousins in that a major axis of variation among them is the means by which a gradable predicate is derived from a noun meaning. The empirical starting point is the contrast between the degree modifiers real, big, and utter, each of which imposes different constraints on what nouns it can modify. The real class is relatively unconstrained, and seems to achieve gradable interpretations via scales of prototypicality. Size adjectives such as big are less flexible: real sportscar has a degree reading but big sportscar does not. Degree modifiers such as utter are more constrained still: big smoker has a degree reading but ^#utter smoker is ill-formed. I suggest that both big and utter access dimensions of gradability lexically provided by the noun, but that utter also imposes the presupposition that the noun provides only one such dimension. The hope is that a theory of such distinctions represents a step toward a typology of adnominal degree expressions, which may in turn reveal something more general about how nominal and adjectival gradability differ.

• 2010. ‘Quantification Galore’. Appeared in 2011 in Linguistic Inquiry 42(4): 671–682. A pre-publication draft is here. BibTeX

  This squib examines the grammar of galore, arguing that it is a quantificational determiner that operates exclusively on kinds. In doing so it realizes a possible determiner denotation that one might independently expect to occur in English in light of Chierchia (1998)’s theory of kind reference across languages.

• 2010. ‘Adjectival Extremeness: Degree Modification and Contextually Restricted Scales’. Appeared in 2012 in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 30(2): 567–609. A pre-publication draft is here, which differs from the published version chiefly in having some additional discussion near the end about cross-categorial considerations. BibTeX

  This paper argues that degree modifiers such as flat-out, downright, positively, and straight-up constitute a distinct natural class specialized for modifying extreme adjectives (such as gigantic, fantastic, or gorgeous), and that extreme adjectives themselves come in two varieties: ones that encode extremeness as part of their lexical semantics and ones that can acquire it on the basis of contextual factors. These facts suggest that a theory is required of what it means for an adjective to be ‘extreme’ in the relevant sense. I propose one, based on the idea that in any given context, we restrict our attention to a particular salient portion of a scale. To reflect this, I suggest that quantification over degrees is—like quantification in other domains—contextually restricted. Extreme adjectives and corresponding degree modifiers can thus both be understood as a means of signaling that a degree lies outside a contextually-provided range.

  (This is a much more developed version of ‘Degree Modification of Extreme Adjectives’ below.)

• 2010. ‘Metalinguistic Comparison in an Alternative Semantics for Imprecision’. Appeared in 2011 in Natural Language Semantics 19(1): 39–86. The link is to a pre-publication version. The final version is here. BibTeX

  This paper offers an analysis of metalinguistic comparatives such as more dumb than crazy in which they differ from ordinary comparatives in the scale on which they compare: ordinary comparatives use scales lexically determined by particular adjectives, but metalinguistic ones use a generally available scale of imprecision or ‘pragmatic slack’. To implement this idea, I propose a novel compositional implementation of Lasersohn (1999)’s pragmatic halos account of imprecision—one that represents clusters of similar meanings as Hamblin alternatives (Hamblin 1973). In the theory that results, existential closure over alternatives mediates between alternative-sets and meanings in which imprecision has been resolved. I then articulate a version of this theory in which the alternatives are not related meanings but rather related utterances, departing significantly from Lasersohn’s original conception. Although such a theory of imprecision is more clearly ‘metalinguistic’, the evidence for it from metalinguistic comparatives in English is surprisingly limited. The overall picture that emerges is one in which the grammatical distinction between ordinary and metalinguistic comparatives tracks the independently-motivated distinction between vagueness and imprecision.

  (This is a much elaborated version of an older paper that appeared in the proceedings of NELS 38 under the same title. The main difference is that this spells out the compositional semantics more explicitly and includes more discussion of just how ‘metalinguistic’ metalinguistic comparatives are.)

• 2010. ‘Expressive Modification and the Licensing of Measure Phrases’. Appeared in 2011 in the Journal of Semantics 28(3): 401–411. A pre-publication draft is here. (This is identical to what was previously titled ‘Expressive Modifiers, Measure Phrases, and Degree Types’.) BibTeX

  This squib points out that adjectives with measure phrases are incompatible with expressive modifiers such as goddamn. It shows that this otherwise mysterious fact can be explained relatively straightforwardly if, as Schwarzschild (2005) has argued, positive adjectives can support measure phrases only as the result of a type-shifting rule in the lexicon.

• 2009. ‘Degree Modification of Extreme Adjectives’. Appeared in the Proceedings of the Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS) 45. Also a talk at the University of British Columbia, for which the handout is available. BibTeX

  A less developed (i.e., shorter) version of ‘Adjectival Extremeness: Degree Modification and Contextually Restricted Scales’ above.

Selected older things:

• 2008. ‘Metalinguistic Comparison in an Alternative Semantics for Imprecision’. Appeared in 2009 in Muhammad Abdurrahman, Anisa Schardl, and Martin Walkow, eds. Proceedings of the North-East Linguistic Society (NELS) 38. GLSA Publications, Amherst, Mass. There is also an extended more recent version of this paper above that develops this work more fully. You should probably look at that rather than the proceedings version. BibTeX

  ‘Metalinguistic’ comparatives such as more dumb than ugly or more a semanticist than a syntactician have until recently remained largely unexamined in the formal semantics literature (the principal exception is Giannakidou and Stavrou 2007). This paper provides an analysis of such structures built on the intuition that they compare not along scales introduced by gradable adjectives—as ordinary comparatives do—but rather along a scale of (im)precision, or of how much pragmatic ‘slack’ must be afforded to judge an expression ‘close enough to true’. This is expressed by reformulating the pragmatic-halos theory of imprecision (Lasersohn 1999) in terms of a Hamblin-style alternative semantics (Hamblin 1973) in a way that allows degrees of imprecision—roughly, ‘halo size’—to be directly compared.

• 2008. ‘Degree Modification of Gradable Nouns: Size Adjectives and Adnominal Degree Morphemes’. Appeared in 2009 in Natural Language Semantics 17(2): 175–203. The link is to the final version, but you could also look at the pre-publication draft. BibTeX

  Degree readings of size adjectives, as in big idiot, cannot be explained as merely a consequence of vagueness or as an extra-grammatical phenomenon. Rather, they reflect the grammatical architecture of nominal gradability. Such readings are available only for size adjectives in attributive positions, and systematically only for adjectives that predicate bigness. These restrictions can be understood as part of a broader picture of gradable NPs in which adnominal degree morphemes—often overt—play a key role, analogous to their role in AP. Size adjectives acquire degree readings through a degree morpheme similar to the one that licenses measure phrases in AP. Its syntax gives rise to positional restrictions on the availability of these readings, and the semantics of degree measurement interacts with the scale structure of size adjectives to give rise to restrictions on the adjective itself.

  (This builds on ‘Size Adjectives and Adnominal Degree Modification’ below, but the analysis here is quite different.)

• 2008. ‘Differential Degrees and Cross-Categorial Measure-Phrase Modification’. Talk, various versions of which took place at Angelika Kratzer’s Birthday Workshop at MIT, by proxy via Gillian Ramchand at the workshop on the Syntax and Semantics of Measurability at CASTL, University of Tromsø, and at Michigan State University. The link is to the MSU handout. (The shorter Tromsø version is here.) BibTeX

  Recent work on the semantics of measure phrases has grappled with the insight that expressions like six feet tall—often taken to be the prototypical and most theoretically revealing cases of MP modification—are in fact unusual, and that differential MPs (as in six feet taller) are actually the unmarked case (Schwarzschild 2005 directly, and more indirectly Kennedy & Levin (2008) and Svenonius & Kennedy 2006). This talk provides further evidence for this view, primarily from the grammar of by MPs across categories, and proposes a way of drawing a sortal distinction between differential degrees and ordinary ones in which differential MP modification emerges as grammatically simpler than its non-differential counterpart.

• 2006. ‘Nonrestrictive Modifiers in Nonparenthetical Positions’. Appeared in 2008 in Louise McNally and Christopher Kennedy, eds. Adverbs and Adjectives: Syntax, Semantics and Discourse. Studies in Theoretical Linguistics. Oxford University Press. BibTeX

  The systematic but often subtle semantic differences between prenominal and postnominal adjectives noted by Bolinger (1967) and others in many respects remain poorly understood. A similar murkiness surrounds many of the differences between preverbal and postverbal adverbs. This paper examines an intriguing parallel between these domains: in English, a nonrestrictive interpretation is possible without parenthetical intonation for prenominal adjectives and preverbal adverbs, but not for postnominal adjectives and postverbal adverbs. This effect is derived here by exploring a possibility made available by the two-dimensional semantics proposed for nonrestrictive modification by Potts (2003): that different dimensions of meaning might observe fundamentally different rules with respect to the syntax-semantics mapping. Through a proposed structural asymmetry in the semantic mechanism that drives nonrestrictive interpretation, a cross-categorial account is developed of why nonparenthetical nonrestrictives occupy the positions that they do, and of how they can receive the proper interpretation in those positions.

• 2005. ‘Atelicity and Measure Phrases: Licensing Measure Phrase Modification Across AP, PP, and VP’. Appeared in 2006 in Donald Baumer, David Montero, and Michael Scanlon, eds. Proceedings of the 25th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL). Cascadilla Press, Somerville, Mass. BibTeX

  This paper relates two issues normally considered separately: the licensing conditions on AP- and PP-modifying measure phrases (such as six feet in six feet above the barn) and the atelicity restriction imposed by certain temporal adverbials. These questions are given a common answer: both classes of expressions are subject to an independently-motivated cross-categorial monotonicity condition on measure-phrase modification, the Modification Condition (Zwarts and Winter 2000, Winter 2001, 2004) of Vector Space Semantics. To make this connection, the vector space approach is extended to temporal semantics and independent evidence is marshaled for assimilating some temporal adverbials to measure phrases. I also pursue a cross-categorial syntax and semantics for measure-phrase modification that may blunt certain arguments in favor of the ontological enrichments advocated in Vector Space Semantics.

  (This builds on ‘Measure DP Adverbials: Measure Phrase Modification in VP’ below and, less directly, ‘Interpreting Measure DP Adverbials’.)

• 2005. ‘Adverbial Modification of Adjectives: Evaluatives and a Little Beyond’. Appeared in 2008 in Johannes Dölling, Tatjana Heyde-Zybatow, and Martin Schäfer, eds. Event Structures in Linguistic Form and Interpretation. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin. BibTeX

  Mostly an abbreviated version of ‘Evaluative Adverbial Modification in the Adjectival Projection’, but also includes some discussion of subject-oriented(-like) interpretations of adverbs in the extended AP.

• 2005. ‘Size Adjectives and Adnominal Degree Modification’. Appeared in 2006 in Effi Georgala and Jonathan Howell, eds. Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistics Theory (SALT) XV. CLC Publications, Ithaca, New York. A more recent and very different analysis of essentially the same data is in ‘Degree Modification of Gradable Nouns: Size Adjectives and Adnominal Degree Morphemes’. BibTeX

  Although the traditional focus of research into degree modification has been the adjectival extended projection, it has long been recognized that degree modification or something quite like it is possible in other categories as well. The conditions under which it is possible, though, and mechanisms that bring it about remain largely mysterious. This paper examines one peculiar species of such modification, exemplified by that enormous idiot or a big beer-drinker, in which a size adjective characterizes a degree associated with the modified noun. Across a number of languages, these readings manifest two intriguing properties: they are possible prenominally but not postnominally, and systematically with adjectives that predicate bigness but not with ones that predicate smallness. In the compositional semantics ultimately proposed here, these generalizations follow from a restriction on how degrees on one scale can be mapped to degrees on another and from an independently-motivated close syntactic parallel between the nominal and adjectival extended projections.

• 2004. ‘Measure DP Adverbials: Measure Phrase Modification in VP’. Ms., Université du Québec à Montréal. Elaborates on ‘Interpreting Measure DP Adverbials’ below. BibTeX

  This paper seeks to establish that measure phrases in the extended AP and PP—such as six feet tall and twenty minutes before midnight—have a direct counterpart in the verbal domain. These verbal measure phrases, exemplified in English in e.g. He slept several hours, constitute a natural class distinct from other DP adverbials and characterized by obligatorily narrow scope, low structural position, an Aktionsart-related presupposition, and quantificationally weak interpretations. This constellation of characteristics is shown to follow naturally from the view that these expressions mirror core syntactic and semantic properties of AP and PP measure phrases. In particular, it will be argued here that these expressions have a syntax that places them in the specifier of a functional projection, just as has long been assumed for AP/PP measure phrases and as has been proposed in a different and independent line of research for adverbials more generally; and that they have a semantics in which they are interpreted as arguments of the head of this licensing projection, and therefore scopally and distributionally constrained and implicated in the aspectual semantics of the clause. Aktionsart information which cannot plausibly come from the DP itself is thereby attributed instead to a verbal feature responsible for licensing the adverbial. Independent evidence for this approach is adduced from true adverbs and parallels with proposals made in the analysis of accusative adverbials in Slavic and in Finnish.

• 2004. ‘Evaluative Adverbial Modification in the Adjectival Projection’. Ms., Université du Québec à Montréal. An abbreviated and in other respects somewhat elaborated version of this is ‘Adverbial Modification in AP: Evaluatives and a Little Beyond’. BibTeX

  Among the principal problems in the syntax and semantics of adverbial modification is how the position and interpretation of adverbs should be related. Efforts toward addressing aspects of this question (from Jackendoff 1972 and McConnell-Ginet 1984 to Cinque 1999 and Ernst 2002) have focused primarily on adverbial modification in the verbal and sentential domain. There are, however, less prototypical uses of adverbs in the adjectival extended projection as well, and interestingly, the interpretation adverbs receive there varies predictably from the one they receive elsewhere. In this respect, adverbial modification in AP offers another perspective on the larger problem. This paper addresses the syntax and semantics of certain such ‘ad-adjectival’ adverbs, presenting an analysis of how their interpretation arises and of how it relates to the interpretation of their counterparts outside the adjectival domain. Along the way, it touches on broader questions about how degree semantics relates to event(uality) semantics, and about how the structure of the extended AP relates to that of the extended VP with respect to adverb licensing.

• 2004. ‘Feature Bundles, Prenominal Modifier Order, and Modes of Composition Below the Word Level’. Ms., Université du Québec à Montréal. BibTeX

  One of the obstacles to identifying the syntactic notion of interpretability (as applied to e.g. interpretable features) with the formal-semantic notion is that there is no agreed-upon way of assigning a denotation to bundles of more than one interpretable feature. This paper explores one means of doing so—loosening the type-theoretical demands a bit by extending the idea that function composition is available in the morphology (which is not new) to feature bundles, though in a modified form. The advantage of this is that a single denotation can be given to an interpretable feature irrespective of whether it occupies its own node or is bundled with others, thereby making possible more representationally conservative phrase structures where desirable without precluding more articulated ones where necessary. The proposal is developed and motivated in the empirical context of otherwise mysterious constraints on the relative order in English of classificatory adjectives, color adjectives, and attributive nouns of a particular sort.

• With Meredith Landman. 2003. ‘Event-Kinds and the Representation of Manner’. In Nancy Mae Antrim, Grant Goodall, Martha Schulte-Nafeh, and Vida Samiian, eds. Proceedings of the Western Conference in Linguistics (WECOL) 2002. California State University, Fresno. (Held at the University of British Columbia.) BibTeX

  In English, expressions introduced by such—as in such a dog—can be taken to involve instantiations of a contextually-provided kind (in the sense of Carlson 1977). Such an understanding is quite natural in part because it is well-established that reference to kinds is possible in the nominal domain. Surprisingly, though, in Polish the analogue of English such—taki, as in taki pies (lit. ‘such-masc dog’)—also occurs in its bare form in the verbal domain, as tak in e.g. tańczyć tak (lit. ‘dance-inf such’; ‘dance that way’). It is possible to extend the kind-reference analysis of adnominal taki to its adverbial counterpart by exploiting the parallelism between individuals and Davidsonian events. But this quite straightforward path leads to an understanding of adverbial tak in terms of a less familiar and perhaps unexpected notion: reference to kinds of events. This paper formulates an analysis framed in these terms and explores its consequences for the semantics of manner.

• 2002. ‘Wholes and Their Covers’. In Brendan Jackson, ed. Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) XII. CLC Publications, Ithaca, New York. BibTeX

  It is a natural and common assumption that adjectives such as whole and entire involve universal quantification over parts of an individual. This paper argues that in a sense exactly the opposite is true: that DPs containing whole and entire are obligatorily non-quantificational expressions. An account is developed in which these adjectives are instead maximizing modifiers in the sense of Brisson (1998). This approach leads to explanations of their scopal and discourse-anaphoric properties, as well as of the determiner restrictions they impose and of how they differ from e.g. complete. In implementing this, the notion of covers (Schwarzschild 1996) is imported in a somewhat modified form from the semantics of plurals into the semantics of singular individuals. Along the way, evidence emerges for a particular conception of choice-function indefinites (Winter 1997, Reinhart 1997, Kratzer 1998, Matthewson 1999).

• 2001. ‘Almost and Its Kin, Across Categories’. In Rachel Hastings, Brendan Jackson, and Zsofia Zvolenszky, eds. Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) XI. CLC Publications, Ithaca, New York. BibTeX

• 2001. ‘Interpreting Measure DP Adverbials’. In K. Megerdoomian and L. A. Bar-el, eds. Proceedings of the 20th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL). Cascadilla Press, Somerville, Mass. There’s not much point reading this. See ‘Measure DP Adverbials: Measure Phrase Modification in VP’ instead. BibTeX

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