Bare Plurals in Spanish are Interpreted as Properties

In this paper, I argue that bare plural noun phrases in Spanish unambiguously denote properties of individuals. I begin by using evidence from their incompatibility with kind-level predicates to show that Spanish bare plurals do not denote kinds. I then point to crucial ways in which their interaction with quantifiers is unlike that of other indefinite NPs (specifically, they have obligatory narrowest scope and cannot contribute the main restriction on a quantifier), and I conclude that bare plurals must therefore have a different semantics from other indefinites. I present a formal semantic analysis which allows for any verbal predicate in Spanish to combine with a propertytype noun phrase, showing how this analysis can also account for certain facts involving discourse anaphora to bare plurals. Finally, I discuss the advantages of the proposed analysis over those which try to maintain a uniform semantics for bare plurals and indefinites and indicate some of the general implications of the proposal

Aesthetic Adjectives

International audienceWe investigate various linguistic criteria that may be used in delineating the class of aesthetic adjectives. We also discuss the relationship between genuinely aesthetic adjectives (of which 'beautiful' and 'ugly' are paradigms) and other adjectives that may, but need not, be used in making an aesthetic judgment

Aesthetic Adjectives

Among semanticists and philosophers of language, there has been a recent outburst of interest in predicates such as delicious, called predicates of personal taste (PPTs, e.g. Lasersohn 2005). Somewhat surprisingly, the question of whether or how we can distinguish aesthetic predicates from PPTs has hardly been addressed at all in this recent work. It is precisely this question that we address. We investigate linguistic criteria that we argue can be used to delineate the class of specifically aesthetic adjectives. We show that there are, in fact, good motivations for keeping PPTs and aesthetic predicates apart: the semantic structure of the former, but not the latter, entails an experiencer. There are many adjectives whose semantic structure arguably also entails an experiencer, yet which are readily used in expressing aesthetic judgments. Adjectives such as provocative or moving are a case in point, since as adjectives they arguably maintain the experiencer argument from the verb they are derived from. Nevertheless, when we describe, say, a sculpture as provocative, or a theater performance as moving, we clearly make aesthetic judgments. The difficult question, then, is to articulate the relationship between an aesthetic predicate (of which beautiful and ugly are paradigms) and other predicates that just happen to be used in making an aesthetic judgment. Tightly related to this point is the more general question of the relationship between an evaluative predicate and a predicate that occurs in an evaluative judgment. One of our aims is to make some progress in addressing these questions

Deriving the Scalar Structure of Deverbal Adjectives

Focusing on the case of deverbal gradable adjectives such as acquainted, we show that the selective behavior of degree modifiers such as very and well provides an important prove on the semantic typology of adjectives. Specifically, we demonstrate that the distribution of degree modifiers is closely tied to the scalar structure of the adjectives they modify, and that scale structure also determines one of the core semantic properties of gradable adjectives: the nature of the «standard values» according to which sentences involving adjectival predications are judged to be true. In addition, we show that in the case of deverbal gradable adjectives, scalar structure can be inferred from the aspectual properties of the source verbs, providing a basis for predicting which degree modifiers will be acceptable with which participles.Centrant-nos en el cas dels adjectius deverbals graduables de l'anglès, com ara acquainted, mostrem que el comportament selectiu de modificadors de gradació com per exemple very i well constitueix una prova important per a la tipologia semàntica dels adjectius. Concretament, demostrem que la distribució dels modificadors de grau està estretament relacionada amb l'estructura escalar dels adjectius que modifiquen i que aquesta estructura escalar també determina una de les propietats semàntiques centrals dels adjectius graduables: la naturalesa dels «valors estàndars» d'acord amb la qual les oracions que contenen predicacions adjectivals es jutgen com a veritables. A més, mostrem que, en el cas dels adjectius deverbals graduables, l'estructura escalar pot inferir-se de les propietats aspectuals dels verbs originals, la qual cosa permet de predir quins modificadors de grau seran acceptables amb quins participis

Idioms and the syntax/semantics interface of descriptive content vs. reference

This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.The syntactic literature on idioms contains some proposals that are surprising from a compositional perspective. For example, there are proposals that, in the case of verb-object idioms, the verb combines directly with the noun inside its DP complement, and the determiner is introduced higher up in the syntactic structure, or is late-adjoined. This seems to violate compositionality insofar as it is generally assumed that the semantic role of the determiner is to convert a noun to the appropriate semantic type to serve as the argument to the function denoted by the verb. In this paper, we establish a connection between this line of analysis and lines of work in semantics that have developed outside of the domain of idioms, particularly work on incorporation and work that combines formal and distributional semantic modelling. This semantic work separates the composition of descriptive content from that of discourse referent introducing material; our proposal shows that this separation offers a particularly promising way to handle the compositional difficulties posed by idioms, including certain patterns of variation in intervening determiners and modifiers.Peer Reviewe

Rhetorically-based scalar-additivity: The view from Italian addirittura

Even-like particles have widely been analyzed as inducing scalar andadditive presuppositions (cf. Horn 1969; Karttunen & Peters 1979; Rooth 1992; Gast& van der Auwera 2011). However, the additivity of even has been controversialsince at least Rullmann 1997 and increasingly called into question (see Greenberg& Umbach 2021 for references); Greenberg specifically argues that scalar even-likeparticles can vary in additivity. This claim is surprising in light of the typologicalstudy in Gast & van der Auwera 2011, which subsumes even and similar expressionsunder a larger class of additive particles. Against this background, we present ananalysis of Italian addirittura, which with perfino has been described as scalaradditive(Visconti 2005) – but only optionally so – and is chosen preferentially overperfino precisely in those contexts that Greenberg takes to challenge the additivity ofeven. We argue, drawing on observations in Atayan 2017, that addirittura contrastswith perfino in deriving its scalar alternatives from rhetorical structure rather thanfocus structure. Once this is recognized we can view addirittura as additive, afterall, in a rhetorical sense we describe below

Aesthetic Adjectives Lack Uniform Behavior

The goal of this short paper is to show that esthetic adjectives—exemplified by “beautiful” and “elegant”—do not pattern stably on a range of linguistic diagnostics that have been used to taxonomize the gradability properties of adjectives. We argue that a plausible explanation for this puzzling data involves distinguishing two properties of gradable adjectives that have been frequently conflated: whether an adjective’s applicability is sensitive to a comparison class, and whether an adjective’s applicability is context-dependent

Fabric sensors – modelling deformation in knitted fabrics

Fabric sensors are made from knitted conductive yarn and can be used to measure extension in wearable technologies and composite structures. Wearable technologies have considerable potential in sport and medical applications, for example recording limb movement in injury monitoring or sporting technique analysis. The electrical resistance through the fabric varies with extension due to the change in contact area and contact force between yarns. The resistance can be interpreted using correlations with displacement to calculate the deformation experienced by the fabric sensor. This paper describes a study which works towards a realistic digital model of a single jersey knitted fabric sensor by considering a non-idealised monofilament yarn of varied cross-section in a dense knit geometry. Models are created using TexGen, software developed at the University of Nottingham, taking advantage of its facility to create complex cross-sections which vary along the length of the yarn. Subsequent finite element analysis using ABAQUS with small representative volume elements and periodic boundary conditions showed high peak stresses at the boundaries, possibly caused by the contact surface being split across the boundary. Subsequent simulations using larger numbers of stitches and with relaxed boundary conditions in the x-direction showed more realistic deformations including reduction in width and curling of the material, reducing the impact of the boundaries on the overall fabric simulation, but with significant computational cost. The results give an initial assessment of deformations and contact pressures, which will aid understanding of the non-linear response found in mechanical testing and improve knowledge of how the inter-yarn contact varies. This work lays the foundation for further work which will aim to improve the similarity between the digital knit geometry and the physical sample, model larger areas of knitted fabric, include residual stresses from manufacture and use a multifilament yarn model. Subsequently the much more complex knitting patterns produced by the manufacturer of these sensors will then be able to be modelled