Abstract
Interface between scalarity and degree modification of adjectives in natural languages instigates across linguistic analysis of them to examine how they interact with each other within and acrosslanguages. This paper, thus, attempts to conduct a semantic analysis of the Sinhala degree modifiershari and harima in comparison to very in English and addresses the questions; whether harima inSinhala requires a lexical denotation different from hari in Sinhala or very in English, and how we canaccount for the incongruity of hari with closed scale adjectives in Sinhala as opposed to thebehaviour of its counterpart in English. The analysis, while referring to seminal papers on the topic,basically builds on Heim’s (2000) and Kennedy & McNally’s (2005) analysis of degree modifiers andscale structure. In conclusion, given its semantic properties, a different lexical denotation for[[harima]], which is meant to be cross linguistically applicable to “very very” in English, is proposed.
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