Scale Structure, Degree Modification, and the Semantics of Gradable Predicates

By Christopher Kennedy, Louise McNally. 2005

1,119 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Language and Linguistics, Philosophy

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/aeadf890fd280d017ad5e3014f802b9bbd37a231

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Citations in the corpus

Dimensions and their poles: A metric and topological approach to opposites (2011, background): “In contrast, DEAD and ALIVE are called complementary opposites, because they do not admit degree modifiers, and cannot be used comparatively (Kennedy & McNally, 2005; Willners & Paradis, 2006).”
Manner and Result in the Roots of Verbal Meaning (2012, background): “…change measured along a scale of possible values in some property of the patient (see also Krifka 1998, Hay, Kennedy, and Levin 1999, Kennedy and McNally 2005, Beavers 2008, 2011b, Kennedy and Levin 2008, and Rappaport Hovav 2008 for various formalizations and further discussion).1 Beavers…”
The grammar of standards: Judge-dependence, purpose-relativity, and comparison classes in degree constructions (2014, methodology): “Adjectives that are found in the AIC are primarily those that were called relative gradable adjectives in the literature (Kennedy and McNally, 2005; Kennedy, 2007).”
Mandarin transitive comparatives and the grammar of measurement (2012, methodology): “(33) MP 10 kg Deg’ Deg µ AP ACOMP heavier PP than Kim a. DegP b. DegP MP 2 cm Deg’ Deg µ AP ACOMP taller PP than Kim Semantically, we follow Faller (2000), Kennedy and McNally (2005a), Svenonius and Kennedy (2006), and Kennedy and Levin (2008) in analyzing comparative adjectives as special kinds of…”
Gradable adjectives, vagueness, and optimal language use: A speaker-oriented model (2014, methodology): “According to the degree-based approach to the semantics of gradable adjectives (e.g., Kennedy & McNally 2005; Kennedy 2007), the denotation of a gradable adjective such as tall is a function that maps individuals to degrees on an abstract scale structure, e.g., JtallK = λx.height(x).”
Formal Distributional Semantics: Introduction to the Special Issue (2016, background): “However, the framework struggles with descriptive content, despite the large amount of work done on lexical semantics and formal ontology (Dowty 1991; Pustejovsky 1995; Pinkal 1995; Guarino, Pribbenow, and Vieu 1996; Kennedy and McNally 2005; Roßdeutscher and Kamp 2010; Asher 2011, among others).”
Mandarin hen and Universal Markedness in gradable adjectives (2012, background): “In Kennedy and McNally (2005), for example, POS is given the following denotation (cf.”
The concepts of constructional mismatch and type-shifting from the perspective of grammaticalization (2007, background): “The head is usually referred to as ‘‘gradable/non-gradable’’, but the terms ‘‘unbounded/bounded’’ (Paradis 2001; Kennedy and McNally 2005) are preferable because of the potential for harmonic relations not only with adjectives (gradable/ non-gradable), but also with verbs (non-telic/telic), and…”
Antonymy and negation (2006, background): “Although their assumptions about the nature of meaning are radically different from ours, Kennedy and McNally (2005) propose similar ideas about gradable predicates.”
A universal scale of comparison (2008, background): “Kennedy and McNally (2005) argue convincingly that even if tall is not associated with a closed scale, full is.”
Mood and gradability: an investigation of the subjunctive mood in Spanish (2008, background): “For each different 19 See for example Bartsch and Venneman (1973), Bierwisch (1989), Cresswell (1976), Heim (1985, 2000), Kennedy (1999, 2001), Kennedy and McNally (2005), Klein (1991), von Stechow (1984a, b).”
Vagueness and grammar: the semantics of relative and absolute gradable adjectives (2007, methodology): “As pointed out by Kennedy and McNally (2005), there is a correlation between the scale structure of a deverbal adjective and the event structure of its source verb: if the verb is telic, its adjectival form has a totally closed scale; if it is atelic, it has a partially closed scale.”