Privative Adjectives: Subsective plus Coercion

0. Introduction Montague (1970a) presented a semantic treatment of adjectives which he credited to unpublished work done independently by Hans Kamp and Terence Parsons; that work, and similar independent work of Romane Clark, was subsequently published (Clark 1970, Kamp 1975, Parsons 1970). The central claim in that work was that adjective meanings should be analyzed as functions from properties to properties. Among adjective meanings, some might satisfy further constraints such as intersectivity or subsectivity, but no such constraint can be imposed on the class as a whole, the argument goes, because of the existence of adjectives like false, ostensible, alleged. The strategy of “generalizing to the worst case”, followed by Montague in order to have a uniform assignment of semantic types to syntactic categories, called for giving all adjectives the type of functions from properties to properties. More restricted subclasses of adjectives, such as the subsective (skillful, good) and intersective (purple, carnivorous) adjectives, might be indicated by the use of meaning postulates. In theories which allow type multiplicity and type-shifting, the intersective adjectives might indeed be assigned the simpler type of oneplace predicates; this is now widely assumed. Kamp and Partee (1995) review the more or less standard “hierarchy” of classes of adjectives as a preliminary to arguing that arguments concerning the appropriateness of prototype theory as a part of the account of the semantics of adjective-noun combinations should be restricted to intersective adjectives. The hierarchy ranges from intersective adjectives like carnivorous to privative adjectives like counterfeit, fake, and fictitious. The same article makes some proposals for coercion of adjective meanings in context, driven by certain general constraints, which help to explain a number of kinds of shifts and adjustments that take place when adjective-noun combinations are interpreted in various kinds of contexts. Some problem cases remained, especially the case of stone lion, where it seems that the noun rather than the adjective shifts its meaning when faced with incompatibility of the primary senses of each word. The aim of the present note is to argue that in fact adjective meanings are more constrained than was appreciated either at the time of the work of Montague, Kamp, Parsons and Clark or at the time of the work of Kamp and Partee. In particular, I will argue that some facts about the possibility of “NP-splitting” in Polish cast serious doubt on the standard hierarchy, and that the data become much more orderly if privative adjectives like counterfeit, fake, and fictitious are reanalyzed as subsective adjectives. Further evidence for that move comes from long-standing puzzles about what to say about sentences like Is that gun real or fake? The revised account requires the possibility of coerced expansion of the denotation of the noun to which such an adjective (as well as adjectives like real, genuine, which were not examined in the earlier-cited literature) is applied. Such coercion can be motivated by treating the constraints on possible adjective meanings as presuppositions that