Rutland Colin. The lexical semantics of gradable nouns in English

University of Manchester, 2022. — 245 p.This thesis discusses the semantics of gradability in English nouns, focusing on their modification by adjectives of size (big, colossal, enormous, huge, etc.) and maximality (absolute, complete, total, utter, etc.) when such modifiers are used as intensifiers of nominal degree, rather than with their ordinary literal meanings. As adnominal intensifiers the big-type adjectives indicate that the referent of the resulting noun phrase is in some sense 'more of an N' than the contextual norm for the unmodified base noun. A big smoker might smoke more frequently, copiously or enthusiastically than the average smoker. In contrast, the utter-type modifiers convey a sense of maximality or totality. A complete idiot is someone who perhaps 'could not be more of an idiot', or who is 'an idiot in every respect'. My investigation builds on the seminal work by Morzycki (2005, 2009, 2012b) and proposes new solutions to some of the main puzzles he addresses, in particular (i) Why are the utter-type modifiers systematically infelicitous with nouns like smoker, when they combine freely with nouns like idiot? (ii) How can the intuitive 'maximality' interpretation of the utter-type modifiers be explained compositionally, given that the nouns they collocate with are typically unbounded? I propose that nouns like smoker reject attempts to impose an upper bound because they entail participation in events, and events can always be extended by factors such as frequency, duration, quantity and enthusiasm, any of which can cause the agent to be objectively construed as a 'bigger N'. In contrast, nouns like idiot are systematically stative and evaluative, and can acquire MAXIMA via two complementary mechanisms. First, speakers can impose a subjective upper limit on an otherwise unbounded scale by treating all degrees above a certain level as if they were a single degree, i.e. as an equivalence class (cf. Morzycki's 2012a analysis of extreme adjectives). In this sense, an utter idiot really is at the top of the scale of idiocy. Second, a phrase like complete idiot can be interpreted as quantification over dimensions, paraphrasable perhaps as idiot in every respect (cf. Sassoon's 2007, 2013a, 2013b work on multi-dimensional adjectives). On one interpretation, expressions like complete and utter idiot combine both readings. The core of the thesis is a new semantic proposal which uniformly treats both classes of gradable nouns as kind-denoting predicates (cf. Constantinescu 2011, 2013), extending Gehrke & McNally's (2015) kind-based analysis of frequent sailor from frequency adjectives to size and maximality modifiers, and from eventive predicates to stative ones. The proposal effectively reverses the dimensionality constraints suggested by Morzycki (2012b), as the unique ability of nouns like idiot to accept universal quantification over 'respects' of idiocy requires them to be inherently multi-dimensional (as de Vries 2010 suggests), while nouns like smoker are one-dimensional.