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Color adjectives and radical contextualism

Hansen, N. (2011) Color adjectives and radical contextualism. Linguistics and Philosophy, 34 (3). pp. 201-221. ISSN 1573-0549

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To link to this item DOI: 10.1007/s10988-011-9099-0

Abstract/Summary

Radical contextualists have observed that the content of what is said by the utterance of a sentence is shaped in far-reaching ways by the context of utterance. And they have argued that the ways in which the content of what is said is shaped by context cannot be explained by semantic theory. A striking number of the examples that radical contextualists use to support their view involve sentences containing color adjectives (“red”, “green”, etc.). In this paper, I show how the most sophisticated analysis of color adjectives within the explanatory framework of compositional truth conditional semantics—recently developed by Kennedy and McNally (Synthese 174(1):79–98 2010)—needs to be modified to handle the full range of contextual variation displayed by color adjectives.

Item Type:Article
Refereed:Yes
Divisions:Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Humanities > Philosophy
ID Code:28670
Uncontrolled Keywords:Contextualism – Context – Color – Adjectives – Gradability – Ambiguity – Predicates of personal taste
Publisher:Springer

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