The role of vagueness in adjective understanding

Abstract

Vagueness is a typical feature of natural language meaning. Though pervasive, vagueness has been identified with one particular class of adjectives: the gradable adjectives called relative. The study of adjective denotations gave rise for long-standing puzzles (Partee, 2007). Kamp (1975) showed that many adjectives that at first looked like nonintersective were instead intersective but context dependent, i.e., vague. A degree theory of vagueness (Kennedy; McNally, 2005) evolved to a grammar of vagueness. All gradable adjectives are context-dependent, but some are absolute, and some are relative, given the different types of standards they require. Among the absolute, there are yet two classes: minimal standard and maximal standard adjectives. So, from a degree semantics view, the truth conditions assigned in a context of utterance to a description containing a degree adjective will not be always the same. Some empirical research has been conducted about the varieties of standards of comparison, but not so many in Brazilian Portuguese. We conducted a survey on the subject. The results reinforce the importance of vagueness for the adjective semantics.