Introduction

Abstract

Abstract Adjectives and adverbs are highly complex and significantly less studied than other major lexical categories such as nouns or verbs. The purpose of this volume is to devote some much needed attention to this complexity. The editors of this volume are semanticists, and it is no accident that all of the chapters presented here touch on semantics in some way. Adjectives and adverbs (or perhaps more precisely, the analysis of modification) force the semanticist to confront three fundamental theoretical issues. The first involves semantic composition. Although early work in Montague semantics generally adopted the so-called “rule-to-rule” hypothesis, which involved associating pairs of syntactic structures or constituent structure rules with semantic composition rules (Bach 1976), since Klein and Sag (1985) it has been more common to assume the arguably simpler and more elegant hypothesis that semantic composition is type-driven, and that idiosyncratic semantic composition rules are not necessary: functors simply apply to their argument co-constituents.’ As will become clear below, the semantics of modification is problematic for at least the simpler versions of type-driven translation when coupled with a simple theory of semantic types.