We are happy to announce a talk by Louise McNally (Barcelona) in the Semantics Colloquium.
The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301.
Title: Kind- vs. token-level modification
Date: November 3
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct
Abstract:
We use language to classify, subclassify, and simply group token entities, and also to attribute properties to the classes, subclasses and groups that we form. In this talk I examine the role of (mainly adjectival) modifiers in these function of language. There is ample evidence that languages distinguish grammatically between the use of modifiers to form a hierarchy of kind and subkind descriptions, to attribute ad-hoc properties to kinds (or subkinds), as well as to form subsets of entities of a given kind. I will survey various sorts of cases, focusing mainly on the elusive category of „relational“ adjective, some challenges I have experienced in studying kind- vs. token-level adjectival modification, and some different techniques for exploring the different kinds of modification.