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Gradability in Natural Language Heather Burnett (Research Scientist, Research Scientist, Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle, CNRS-Universite Paris 7-Denis Diderot)

Gradability in Natural Language By Heather Burnett (Research Scientist, Research Scientist, Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle, CNRS-Universite Paris 7-Denis Diderot)

Summary

This book presents a new theory of the relationship between vagueness, context-sensitivity, gradability, and scale structure in natural language. Heather Burnett proposes a new formal reasoning system called DelTCS in which she sets out a completely new theory of gradable linguistic constructions.

Gradability in Natural Language Summary

Gradability in Natural Language: Logical and Grammatical Foundations by Heather Burnett (Research Scientist, Research Scientist, Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle, CNRS-Universite Paris 7-Denis Diderot)

This book presents a new theory of the relationship between vagueness, context-sensitivity, gradability, and scale structure in natural language. Heather Burnett argues that it is possible to distinguish between particular subclasses of adjectival predicates-relative adjectives like tall, total adjectives like dry, partial adjectives like wet, and non-scalar adjectives like hexagonal-on the basis of how their criteria of application vary depending on the context; how they display the characteristic properties of vague language; and what the properties of their associated orders are. It has been known for a long time that there exist empirical connections between context-sensitivity, vagueness, and scale structure; however, a formal system that expresses these connections had yet to be developed. This volume sets out a new logical system, called DelTCS, that brings together insights from the Delineation Semantics framework and from the Tolerant, Classical, Strict non-classical framework, to arrive at a full theory of gradability and scale structure in the adjectival domain. The analysis is further extended to examine vagueness and gradability associated with particular classes of determiner phrases, showing that the correspondences that exist between the major adjectival scale structure classes and subclasses of determiner phrases can also be captured within the DelTCS system.

About Heather Burnett (Research Scientist, Research Scientist, Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle, CNRS-Universite Paris 7-Denis Diderot)

Heather Burnett is a CNRS researcher in the Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle at l'Universite Paris 7-Denis Diderot. In 2012, she completed her PhD thesis in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles under the supervision of Edward Keenan and Dominique Sportiche. From 2012-2014, she was a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at l'Universite de Montreal; from 2014-2015, she was a CNRS postdoctoral researcher at l'Universite de Toulouse 2-Jean Jaures; and in 2015, she was a Banting postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto. Her work on formal semantics, formal syntax, and language variation and change has appeared in Linguistic Variation, Linguistics and Philosophy, and Journal of Semantics.

Table of Contents

1: Introduction 2: Vagueness and linguistic analysis 3: Context-sensitivity and vagueness patterns 4: The Delineation TCS framework 5: Scale structure in Delineation Semantics 6: Beyond Delineation Semantics 7: Beyond the adjectival domain 8: Conclusion

Additional information

NPB9780198724797
9780198724797
0198724799
Gradability in Natural Language: Logical and Grammatical Foundations by Heather Burnett (Research Scientist, Research Scientist, Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle, CNRS-Universite Paris 7-Denis Diderot)
New
Hardback
Oxford University Press
2016-12-08
240
N/A
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