Marcin Morzycki

About the book

The main points, FAQ-style:

What’s on this page?: Abstracts and drafts of several chapters of a book, along with a draft of the whole thing.
What kind of book?: Something between an advanced textbook for people who already have a background in semantics and a survey of work on the semantics of modification (in particular, the semantics of adjectives, adverbs, and degrees). For more on the purpose and scope of the book, look at chapter 1 in the book or in this full draft manuscript.
What’s it called? Gimme a link to the manuscript and a BibTeX thinger.: Modification. It’s for the Cambridge University Press series Key Topics in Semantics and Pragmatics. BibTeX

Below are non-final drafts of chapters as separate files. A disadvantage of viewing the chapters separately is that clickable links to other chapters don’t work or even display properly.

Chapter 2. ‘The Lexical Semantics of Adjectives: More Than Just Scales’. BibTeX

One could be forgiven for getting the impression that the semantics of adjectives is, above all, the semantics of scales. Yet this would be a misimpression, as this chapter strives to demonstrate. It is about the lexical semantics of adjectives, but it is not about scales. Section 2 presents a typology of adjectives according the effect they have on nouns they modify. Section 3 sketches various theoretical approaches that shed light on that typology. Section 4 begins the exploration of particular analytically-tractable classes of adjectives, focusing on adjectives that interact in interesting ways with their nouns. Section 5 continues the exploration of adjective classes, but shifts the focus to adjectives with surprising scope properties. Finally, section 6 considers additional issues closely linked to the syntax of adjectives, including their relative order and the positions they can occupy.
Chapter 3. ‘Vagueness, Degrees, and Gradable Predicates’. BibTeX

The chapter begins with a discussion of vagueness in section 2. Section 3 gives a thumbnail sketch of theories of vagueness and gradability and explores one approach that hasn’t much captured the imagination of formal semanticists. Sections 4 and 5 presents two approaches that have. Section 6 compares them, considering the question of the status the notion ‘degree’ should have in the grammar. Finally, section 7 turns to scalar issues in the lexical semantics of adjectives.
Chapter 4. ‘Comparatives and Their Kin’. BibTeX

This chapter examines the semantics of comparatives and their grammatical relatives, such as the equative, which positively bristle with subtle and often vexing puzzles. These puzzles provide insight into a surprisingly wide array of issues: the nature of comparison, of course, but also the ontology of degrees, scope taking mechanisms, ellipsis, negative polarity items, modality, focus, type-shifting, contextual domain restrictions, imprecision, and semantic crosslinguistic variation. This will also give us an opportunity to address the syntax of the extended AP in earnest for the first time. Section 2 confronts the mapping between syntax and semantics in the adjectival extended projection, with special attention to the comparative. Section 3 provides a tour of other degree constructions, including differential comparatives, equatives, superlatives, and others. Section 4 is the one most directly relevant to the puzzle we began the chapter with: the question of why the entailments of apparently very similar degree constructions differ subtly. Finally, section 5 concludes with a discussion of the crosslinguistic picture.
Chapter 5. ‘Adverbs’. BibTeX

This chapter is devoted to adverbs, a highly heterogenous class of modifiers that present a variety of vexing problems. Section 2 considers how some taxonomical organization can be introduced into the chaos of adverbs. Section 3 then takes the first steps toward an analysis, wrestling with foundational compositional questions and a puzzle involving intensionality. Section 4 examines two classes of adverbs (manner and subject-oriented) in more detail. Section 5 turns to adverbs that occur higher in the clause. Section 6 introduces some facts and tools relevant to locative adverbials. Section 7 turns to the ill-understood phenomenon of adverbs as modifiers of adjectival projections. Section 8 mostly just sets aside temporal and quantificational adverbials. Section 9 concludes by revisiting the questions of the relative order of adverbs.
Chapter 6. ‘Crosscategorial Concerns’. BibTeX

This chapter considers, in light of the previous chapters, a number of crosscategorial phenomena not yet addressed. In section 2, we confront expressions that measure individuals by their amount, and the comparatives built out of these expressions. This requires combining our standing assumptions about degree semantics with assumptions and DPs an individuals. Section 3 examines the issue of cross-categorial gradability more broadly, focusing on verbs and nouns, both of which seem to be gradable in different ways and one of which introduces into the discussion some new parallels between individuals and events. Section 4 addresses the problem of crosscategorial modifiers that hedge or reinforce a claim, but can’t be readily assimilated to the degree modifiers we’ve already encountered in other domains. Section 5 focuses on an issue we’ve systematically set aside throughout the book: nonrestrictive interpretations of modifiers, which turn out to extend far beyond relative clauses, their traditional home. Part of that entails struggling with what ‘nonrestrictive’ actually means. Finally, section 6 examines the phenomenon an aspect of meaning that is inherently subjective in a particular way, one that gives rise to the possibility of interlocutors contradicting each other truth-conditionally without being at odds with each other pragmatically.