Color, context, and compositionality

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• dc.contributor.author Kennedy, Christopherca
• dc.contributor.author McNally, Louise, 1965-ca
• dc.date.accessioned 2015-03-03T13:38:38Z
• dc.date.available 2015-03-03T13:38:38Z
• dc.date.issued 2010ca
• dc.description.abstract Color adjectives have played a central role in work on language typology and/nvariation, but there has been relatively little investigation of their meanings by researchers/nin formal semantics. This is particularly surprising given the fact that color terms have/nbeen at the center of debates in the philosophy of language over foundational questions,/nin particular whether the idea of a compositional, truth-conditional theory of natural language semantics is even coherent. The challenge presented by color terms is articulated in/nparticular detail in the work of Charles Travis. Travis argues that structurally isomorphic/nsentences containing color adjectives can shift truth value from context to context depending on how they are used and in the absence of effects of vagueness or ambiguity/polysemy,/nand concludes that a deterministic mapping from structures to truth conditions is impossible. The goal of this paper is to provide a linguistic perspective on this issue, which we/nbelieve defuses Travis’ challenge. We provide empirical arguments that color adjectives/nare in fact ambiguous between gradable and nongradable interpretations, and that this simple ambiguity, together with independently motivated options concerning scalar dimension/nwithin the gradable reading accounts for the Travis facts in a simpler, more constrained, and/nthus ultimately more successful fashion than recent contextualist analyses such as those in/nSzabó (2001) or Rothschild and Segal (forthcoming).en
• dc.format.mimetype application/pdfca
• dc.identifier.citation Kenneddy C, McNally L. Color, context, and compositionality. Synthese. 2010;174(1):79-98. DOI 10.1007/s11229-009-9685-7.ca
• dc.identifier.issn 0039-7857ca
• dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/10230/23156
• dc.language.iso engca
• dc.publisher Springerca
• dc.relation.ispartof Synthese. 2010;174(1):79-98
• dc.rights © Springer (The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com)ca
• dc.rights.accessRights info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccessca
• dc.subject.other Gramàtica comparada i general -- Adjectiu
• dc.subject.other Gramàtica comparada i general -- Semàntica
• dc.title Color, context, and compositionalityca
• dc.type info:eu-repo/semantics/articleca
• dc.type.version info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersionca