Semantic underspecification and its contextual resolution in the domain of degrees
Keywords: Linguistics.

Many natural language expressions have context-sensitive interpretations, which can make it difficult to pin down the exact meaning of an expression. To address this challenge, it is common for semanticists to assign context-sensitive expressions underspecified meaning representations, where parts of the meanings need to be resolved in context. This naturally raises two important theoretical issues concerning their semantics/pragmatics interface: (i) How do we represent their conventional, context-invariant meaning (i.e., the semantic question)? (ii) How does context, together with the conventional meaning, determine the interpretation (i.e., the metasemantic question)? In this dissertation, I focus on the domain of degrees and argue for the generality and importance of the distinction between semantic contextual resolution mechanisms and pragmatic ones in addressing these questions. The contrast is in parallel with that between the pronouns "I" (which conventionally refers to the speaker in context) and "they" (whose referent is determined via pragmatic reasoning). Concretely, I use directional modified numerals (e.g., "up to 100") and gradable adjectives (e.g., "tall" and "full") as two case studies to argue that (a) the two contextual resolution mechanisms can be unified by a general principle of informativity-applicability trade-off, which is a quantitative generalization of the interaction between Grice's maxims of Quantity and Quality, and that (b) the way to tease them apart is by examining whether the contextual resolution of an expression is sensitive to the larger linguistic environment in which it appears. If yes, the mechanism is pragmatic, and if no, it is semantic. For directional modified numerals, the opposite inference patterns they trigger when they are unembedded and embedded under deontic modals suggest that they have a pragmatic contextual resolution mechanism. For relative and maximum gradable adjectives, I examine how they are used in definite descriptions in referential contexts and argue that, contrary to some recent proposals, their contextual resolution mechanism is in fact semantic in nature. In addition to providing a more precise and unified semantics for relative (e.g., "tall") and maximum (e.g., "full") gradable adjectives, I further examine the class of minimum gradable adjectives (e.g., "bent") and illustrate that many of them are in fact systematically ambiguous between a relative reading and a > 0 reading, which is based on a meaningful notion of zero rather than the minimum. I argue that this suggests a new taxonomy of positive forms of gradable adjectives. On the one hand, some positive forms are threshold-introducing, which include maximum and relative adjectives, together with minimum adjectives with relative readings. They share a unified semantics and their differences are explained by the different contextual parameters. On the other hand, the > 0 reading of a gradable adjective is derived in a way parallel to comparative constructions, which provides a straightforward explanation of their similarities observed in the literature