Syntax-semantics mismatches in English adjectival modification
Authors
- Luis Manuel Estudillo Díaz (ES) Universidad de Cádiz https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6842-2670
Abstract
Both positivist philosophy (Frege, 1879, 1892) and analytic philosophy (Russell, 1905, 1940; Quine, 1953, 1960) hold that the surface form of many linguistic expressions does not reveal all their meaning possibilities in an optimally transparent manner. In natural languages there exist discrepancies in composition between the syntactic structure of certain sentences and their corresponding semantic structure. It seems that the way they are composed at the level of surface form does not correspond parallelly with the way they are composed at the level of meaning (Huang, 1982; May, 1985; Sportiche, 1988). On the basis of these theoretical considerations, we undertake the present work on English adjectival modification. In this article we examine agent-oriented and mental-attitude adjectives and show that the syntactic configuration of the sentences in which they participate does not correspond biunivocally with their semantic interpretation.
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Copyright (c) 2023 Luis Manuel Estudillo Díaz
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