Past Event

“Roles and the semantics of presidential-adjectives”

Dr. Curt Anderson
(Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf)

In this talk I examine the semantics of a class of denominal attributive adjectives denoting roles, what I call role-denoting relational adjectives or presidential–adjectives. Presidential best exemplifies this semi-productive class of adjectives, but other examples include papal, senatorial, and mayoral. These adjectives motivate a linguistic distinction between roles and the individuals who instantiate that role at a particular time. (1a) and (1b) demonstrate this distinction. (1a) allows one to talk of visits at an official role level (to Congress) and at a personal level (to his mother and to Disneyland), but (1b) requires talk at the role level; saturating the Goal argument of visit with to the president’s mother and to Disneyland results in anomaly, due to these Goals clashing with our knowledge of what visits a president (usually) makes in their official capacity as president.

(1)

a. the president’s visit (to Congress/to his mother/to Disneyland)

b. a presidential visit (to Congress/#to the president’s mother/#to Disneyland)

In similar fashion, the verbal predication with the nominal form president in (2) doesn’t give rise to the inference with the adjective presidential in (3). And, (4a) must denote an official advisor to the president, while (4b) allows the possibility that this advisor is unofficial in some way (such as a personal tax advisor).

(2) The president visited his mother.

(3) There was a presidential visit to the president’s mother.

(4)

a. a presidential advisor          (role meaning only)

b. the president’s advisor          (role or personal meaning)

I point out difficulties in extending current accounts of relational adjectives (such as Arsenijević et al. 2014, McNally and Boleda 2004) to these presidential-adjectives, and argue that a finer-grained theory of lexical meaning can help us understand their meaning and the compositional processes involved in their use as modifiers. With this in mind, I formalize a new account using tools from Frame Semantics (Petersen 2007, Löbner 2014). This account provides insight into the representation of roles and how lexical knowledge and world knowledge interact.

This event is sponsored by the School of Linguistics and Language Studies.