Adjectives and Adverbs Syntax, Semantics, and Discourse Introduction

Adjectives and adverbs are highly complex and significantly less studied than other major lexical categories such as nouns or verbs. The purpose of this volume is to devote some much needed attention to this complexity.

The editors of this volume are semanticists, and it is no accident that all of the chapters presented here touch on semantics in some way. Adjectives and adverbs (or perhaps more precisely, the analysis of modification) force the semanticist to confront three fundamental theoretical issues. The first involves semantic composition. Although early work in Montague semantics generally adopted the so-called “rule-to-rule” hypothesis, which involved associating pairs of syntactic structures or constituent structure rules with semantic composition rules (Bach 1976), since Klein and Sag (1985) it has been more common to assume the arguably simpler and more elegant hypothesis that semantic composition is type-driven, and that idiosyncratic semantic composition rules are not necessary: functors simply apply to their argument co-constituents.¹ As will become clear below, the semantics of modification is problematic for at least the simpler versions of type-driven translation when coupled with a simple theory of semantic types.

A second general issue raised by adjective and adverbial modification involves the amount and kind of semantic and discourse-related information that must be conventionally encoded in the lexicon – not only in the modifying expressions, but also in those modified – and how it should be encoded.

For example, to mention just a few sorts of phenomena considered in this volume, issues of lexical representation and complexity arise when we try to capture semantic generalizations such as the relation between the gradability properties of adjectives and the Aktionsart of related verbs (see the chapter by Kennedy and Levin), the similarities and differences between the gradability properties of adjectives, adverbs, verbs, and nouns (the contribution by Doetjes), or the differences between the ability of different classes of predicates to accept modification (that of Katz).

Finally, an account of the particular behavior of various semantic classes of adjectives and adverbs has implications for the theory of discourse structure. Notions familiar from descriptive grammars such as restrictive vs. nonrestrictive adjectival modification or speaker-oriented adverbial modification arguably require a semantic or discourse model which makes some sort of reference to the speech act or dialogue move being made; other phenomena point to the need to model separately the information states of the speaker and hearer. Recent work such as Ginzburg and Sag (2001), Gunlogson (2001), and Potts (2005) exemplify different approaches to enriching the representation of how utterances can modify the context; case studies involving adjectives and adverbs such as those presented in this volume can serve to evaluate and refine these approaches.

In the remainder of this chapter, we first highlight some of the specific issues in the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of adjectives and adverbs that are addressed in this volume; we then briefly introduce the individual contributions.

1 Though see e.g. Miller (1992) for an early criticism of type-driven composition; note also that work such as Pustejovsky (1995), Farkas and de Swart (2003), and Chung and Ladusaw (2004) has revived interest in more complex semantic composition processes.