Context sensitivity and vagueness patterns

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter presents the main empirical patterns associated with adjectival context sensitivity and vagueness. The book argue that the different scale structure classes of adjectives vary with respect to comparison class-based context sensitivity. It is argued that to properly understand this variation, it is useful to adopt two patterns of comparison class-based context sensitivity: universal context sensitivity and existential context sensitivity. The book argues that three of the four scale structure subclasses can be distinguished based on their context sensitivity: relative adjectives are universally context sensitive, both partial and total adjectives are existentially context sensitive, and non-scalars are not context sensitive. This chapter also motivates an empirical connection between vagueness and the scale structure classes. It is shown that the distribution of the puzzling properties of vague language is tied to these lexical class distinctions, and proposed that the observed dependencies argue in favor of a closer relationship between the phenomena of vagueness and scale structure than is often assumed.