Emerita

Barbara H. Partee*
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

UDC: 811.161.1367.623:8137; 811.162.1367.623:8137

FORMAL SEMANTICS, LEXICAL SEMANTICS,

AND COMPOSITIONALITY:
THE PUZZLE OF PRIVATIVE ADJECTIVES1

1. INTRODUCTION
Semantics is an inherently interdisciplinary subject, with roots in linguistics,
psychology, anthropology, logic and philosophy of language, artificial intelligence, and
more; it is a subject that benefits from interdisciplinary perspectives. Semantics has
meant different things in different disciplines, reflecting the many ways that different
disciplines are concerned with meaning. Even within a single discipline, there are often
disputes about the nature of meaning and the best way to study semantics, including
disagreements about which kinds of data are most important, and even disagreements
about such foundational issues as whether semantics is best viewed as a branch of
mathematics or as a branch of psychology (Partee 1979).
In this paper I take the perspective of formal semantics, a field with roots in
logic, philosophy of language, and formal linguistics (Partee 1996), and examine the
interaction of word meaning and the compositional building up of sentence meaning.
A central concern for the study of meaning is how the meanings of complex expressions
are composed from the meanings of their constituent parts. Even without deciding just
what meanings are, the fact that language users can understand novel sentences, of
which there are a potential infinity, provides an argument that they must be governed
by some version of the Principle of Compositionality, or Freges Principle:
Principle of Compositionality: The meaning of a whole is a function of the
meanings of the parts and of the way they are syntactically combined.
There have been challenges to this principle; my own view is that (a) there are
so many variables in linguistic theories that it can hardly be a straightforwardly
empirical claim, but (b) it makes a good working principle: apparent counterexamples
are invitations to work hard to uncover new descriptive accounts or to make revisions
somewhere in the theoretical framework.
The focus of the paper is the dynamic interaction of meaning and context. One
important challenge faced by compositional approaches such as formal semantics
is how to account for context-dependent meaning shifts without abandoning

* Kontakt podaci (Email): [email protected]

11
Emerita

compositionality. We argue here that in fact compositionality can be seen as one of the
driving forces in context-sensitive meaning shifts. Our case study will be the semantics
of different kinds of adjectives. The interplay of context-dependence and intensionality
will be illustrated in showing why skillful is intensional but large is not, even though
both are relative. We will also take up the puzzles of privative adjectives like fake
and redundant adjectives like real. The perspective we will take is how attention to
the semantics of syntactic structure (compositional semantics) sheds light on the word
meaning, and how compositional semantics, lexical semantics, and the context of the
utterance all interact.
The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 briefly reviews the adjective
classification summarized in Kamp and Partee (1995) and in Partee (1995). The Polish
NP-splitting data (Nowak 2000) and the problem they pose for the familiar hierarchy
are presented in Section 3. In Section 4 I propose a solution to the problem presented
in Section 3 that offers some new insight into the interaction of lexical meaning,
compositionality, and context.

2. THE SEMANTICS OF ADJECTIVES

There are many semantically interesting properties of adjectives. Here we focus on
just a few central issues in the formal semantics of adjectives, concerning their semantic
type and their logical properties. The central claim in work by philosophers of language
in the 1970s (Clark 1970; Kamp 1975; Montague 1970a; Parsons 1970) was that some
adjective meanings must be analyzed as functions from properties to properties.
Adjectives that require such a semantics include alleged, proposed, former.
Since Montague (1970b, 1973) required a uniform semantic type for each syntactic
category, he analyzed all adjectives that way. Simpler adjectives, those that are
intersective (purple, carnivorous), or subsective (skillful, good), have their meanings
further restricted by meaning postulates. Contemporary theories do not insist on
a single type for all adjectives, and the intersective adjectives are now most often
analyzed as simple one-place predicates, type <e,t>.
Adjectives have been considered to form a hierarchy of classes, from the simplest
intersective type to the privative adjectives like counterfeit, fake, Russian falivyj false,
mnimyj imaginary, as we will show in more detail below. But data from Polish and
Russian NP-splits can be used to argue for a radically different view of the privative
adjectives, and a correspondingly different view of the adjective hierarchy.

2.1. MEANING POSTULATES FOR CLASSES OF ADJECTIVES

Adjectives like carnivorous, rectangular, red, and German are intersective: the
informally stated meaning postulate in (1) holds for any N.

(1) ||carnivorous N|| = ||carnivorous|| ||N||

Intersective adjectives are one-place predicates: a red dress is red and is a dress.

12
 Emerita

But skillful is not intersective, as shown by the invalid inference pattern in (2),
familiar from the work of Kamp, Parsons, Clark, and Montague.

(2) Premise: Francis is a skillful surgeon.

Premise: Francis is a violinist.
------------------------------------------------
Conclusion: Francis is a skillful violinist. INVALID

Skillful, typical are not intersective, but are subsective: Meaning Postulate (3)
holds for any N.

(3) Subsectivity: ||skillful N|| ||N||

The adjectives former, alleged, counterfeit, Russian falivyj false, mnimyj

imaginary are neither intersective nor subsective. They are nonsubsective.

(4) a. ||former senator|| ||former|| ||senator||

b. ||former senator|| ||senator||

Nonsubsective adjectives may either be modal expressing possibility or

other modal meanings -- or privative, entailing negation. The meaning postulate for
privative adjectives is stated in (5).

(5) ||counterfeit N|| ||N|| =

There is no meaning postulate for the modal adjectives, since they have no
entailments an alleged murderer may or may not be a murderer, and similarly for
adjectives like possible, proposed, expected, doubtful.
The adjectives thus form a hierarchy from intersective to subsective to
nonsubsective, with the privative adjectives an extreme case of the nonsubsective
adjectives.

(6) Adjective hierarchy: Intersective < Subsective < Modal < Privative

Classification of examples is not always easy. Sometimes there is empirical

uncertainty, e.g. whether dead is privative or intersective. The question, Is a dead poet
a poet? does not have a context-independent answer. We answer differently in the
context of the question, How many poets are there in Amherst? than in the context
of the question, How many poets are included in that anthology? And sometimes
different senses of an adjective fall into different classes: Russian tonye asy exact
(accurate) watch has an intersective sense of tonyj, while in tonaja kopija exact copy,
tonaja is subsective. We have an intersective sense of strogyj strict in strogij kostjum
strict (tailored) suit and a subsective sense in strogij uitel strict teacher.
Among many debated points, one which has always been troubling is the question
of whether a modifier like fake is really privative. One nagging problem, to which we

13
Emerita

will offer a solution in Section 4, is the evident tension between the apparent truth of
(7a) and the undeniable well-formedness and interpretability of (7b).

(7) a. A fake gun is not a gun.

b. Is that gun real or fake?

2.2. IS TALL INTERSECTIVE OR SUBSECTIVE?

An early argument for the importance of considering context-dependence in
interpreting adjectives came from Kamp (1975), who argued that tall, which at first
seems non-intersective, is really intersective but context-dependent. In section 2.1
above we indicated that the inference pattern (2) was a test of whether an adjective
was intersective. By this test, it looks like vague adjectives like tall are nonintersective:

(2) Premise: Tom is a tall 14yearold.

Premise: Tom is a basketball player.
---------------------------------------------------
Conclusion: Tom is a tall basketball player. INVALID??

Kamp argued that tall is intersective but vague and context-dependent. One
argument is that we can get the same effect as above without changing the noun, by
changing other aspects of the context.

(8) a. My 2-year-old son built a really tall snowman yesterday.

b. The linguistics students built a really tall snowman last weekend.

Further evidence of a difference between truly nonintersective subsective

adjectives like skillful and vague intersective adjectives like tall came from Siegel
(1976), who observed that adjectives like skillful can take as-phrases, as in He is skillful
as a surgeon, while adjectives like tall take not as-phrases but for-phrases to indicate
comparison class: He is tall for a 14-year-old, but not for a basketball player.
An adjective can be nonintersective and also vague, like good, and then it can take
both an as-phrase and a for-phrase: He is very good as a diagnostician for someone with
so little experience.

3. MODAL AND PRIVATIVE ADJECTIVES AND NP-SPLITS

The phenomenon of split NPs in Slavic was brought to my attention by Anita
Nowak (Nowak 2000). It has been studied by Siewierska (1984), Sekerina (1997),
Gouskova (2000), Junghanns (2001), Melhorn (2001), Bai (2004), Fanselow and avar
(2002), Kuerov (2007), and especially Pereltsvaig (2008). My earlier work on this
topic uses Polish examples from Nowak; here I add Russian and Polish examples from
Pereltsvaig (2008 and p.c.), Trugman (p.c.), and Rozwadowska (p.c.).

14
 Emerita

The Russian examples (9a-b) from Sekerina (1997) are typical direct and inverse
NP-splits. Underlining indicates the parts of the split NP.

(9) a. rnyj on ljubit kofe. (Sekerina 1997)

black he likes coffee
He likes black coffee.

b. Kofe on ljubit rnyj.

coffee he likes black
He likes black coffee.

The facts are that an NP consisting of Adj and N in Polish or Russian may be split,
with either the Adj sentence-initial and the N sentence-final, or the N sentence-initial and
the Adj sentence-final. Sequences of Adjs can be sentence-initial; only a single element
can be sentence-final. Examples of Polish NP-splits from Nowak (2000) (all actually PP-
splits, which combine properties of NP-splits with constraints on where the preposition
can end up) are given in (10 - 11) below, with the relevant constituents underlined.

(10) a. Kelnerki rozmawiay o przystojnym chopcu.

waitresses talked about handsome-loc boy-loc
The waitresses talked about a handsome boy.

b. O przystojnym kelnerki rozmawiay chopcu.

about handsome-loc waitresses talked boy-loc
The waitresses talked about a handsome BOY

(11) a. Wamano si do nowego sklepu.

broke-in (one) reflex to new-gen store-gen
Someone broke into the new store.

b. Do sklepu wamano si nowego.

to store-gen broke-in (one) reflex new-gen
Someone broke into the NEW store.

What is of particular interest here is that some adjectives can participate in the
splitting construction and some cannot. According to Nowaks judgments, intersective,
subsective, and privative (!) adjectives can split easily enough. But nonsubsective modal
adjectives cannot. The contrast is shown in (12) and (13).

(12) a. Do rozlegej weszlimy doliny.

to large-gen (we)entered valley-gen
We entered a large VALLEY.
b. Do doliny weszlimy rozlegej
to valley-gen (we)entered large-gen
We entered a LARGE valley.

15
Emerita

(13) *Z potencjalnym widzieli si kandydatem.

with potential-instr (they)saw refl candidate-instr
They met with a potential CANDIDATE

But others disagree about modal adjectives; the data are apparently more complex,
in Polish and in Russian. Some NP-splits with modal adjectives are fine, others are not.

(14) O potencjalnych rozmawiai korzyciach (Polish).

about potential they-talked benefits
They talked about potential benefits. (Rozwadowska, p.c.)

(15) O domniemanych rozmawiano przestpcach. (Polish)

about alleged it-was-talked criminals
(They) talked about alleged criminals. (Rozwadowska, p.c.)

(16) *Domniemanych spotkaismy zlodziei. (Polish)

alleged we-met thieves
We met alleged thieves. (Rozwadowska, p.c.)

(17) Potencialnym on byl kandidatom, ne bolee togo! (Russian)

Potential-instr he was candidate-instr, neg more that-gen
He was a potential candidate, no more! (Trugman, p.c.)

(18) Predpologaemyx oni arestovali ue pjat ubijc, a vot

Alleged they arrested already 5 murderers, and prt
est li sredi nix nastojaij, kto znaet? (Russian)
is there among them actual, who knows?

They already arrested five alleged murderers, and who knows whether there
is an actual one among them. (Trugman, p.c.)

(19) Oidaemye ne nastupili peremeny, xotja oidali ix

Expected neg arrived changes, although they-awaited them
dolgo i terpelivo. (Russian)
long and patiently
The expected changes didnt come, although they had awaited them long
and patiently. (Trugman, p.c.)

Pereltsvaig (2008), using a substantial corpus of colloquial Russian, with intonation

patterns verifiable for a substantial part including movies and their scripts, has reached
the following conclusions: (i) In NP-splits, the first segment is either a contrastive topic
or a contrastive focus. (ii) The same word orders are possible for contrastive topic
examples and contrastive focus examples. (iii) Intonation reliably distinguishes the
two types, with Intonation Contour 2 (IK-2) in vedova (1980) for contrastive focus, and
Intonation Contour 5 (IK-5) for contrastive topic2.

16
 Emerita

Pereltsvaigs conclusions are illustrated in Russian examples (20-23) below.

Examples (20-21) have contrastive focus, and show intonation pattern IK-2, whether
with scrambling or with split NP. Boldface indicates intonational prominence.

(20) Malinovogo varenja ona mne prislala! (a ne klubninogo)

raspberry jam she to-me sent! (and not strawberry)
She sent me raspberry jam! (and not strawberry)

(21) Malinovogo ona mne prislala varenja! (a ne klubninogo)

raspberry she to-me sent jam! (and not strawberry)
She sent me raspberry jam! (and not strawberry)

Examples (22-23) have contrastive topic, and have the intonation pattern
Pereltsvaig calls IK-4 whether with scrambling or with split NP.

(22) Malinovogo varenja ona mne prislala! (a klubninogo Sae)

raspberry jam she to-me sent! (and strawberry to Sasha)
She sent raspberry jam to me! (and strawberry to Sasha)

(23) Malinovogo ona mne prislala varenja! (a klubninogo Sae)

raspberry she to-me sent jam! (and strawberry to Sasha)
She sent raspberry jam to me! (and strawberry to Sasha)

Pereltsvaig makes the crucial observation (Pereltsvaig, p.c.) that in all the good
Russian examples of split NPs with modal adjectives, the modal adjective must have
contrastive focus; other adjectives have no such restriction.
So the generalization so far is that intersective and subsective adjectives can freely
participate in NP-split constructions. But modal adjectives are more restricted; they cannot
split freely, although it seems that they can split when they are the contrastive focus.
But the surprising fact is that privative adjectives are as easy to split as intersective
and subsective ones. Polish privatives, such as fikcyjny (fictitious), wymylony
(imaginary), faszywy (fraudulent), easily split, in both contrastive topic and contrastive
focus constructions. The Polish examples below are from Boena Rozwadowska (p.c.):

(24) Faszywy by to alarm.

false was it alarm

(25) Faszywe znalelimy banknoty.

false we-found banknotes

(26) Fikcyjne zawara maestwo.

Fictitious she-signed marriage

Russian privatives falivyj false, fake, mnimyj imaginary, false, byvyj former
similarly split easily, whether contrastive topic or contrastive focus motivates the split:

17
Emerita

(27) Falivyj on poluil diplom. (H. Trugman, p.c.)

False he obtained diploma

(28) Mnimye nam ne nuny geroi! (H. Trugman, p.c.)

Fake to-us neg needed heroes
We dont need fake (pretend) heroes!

(29) Byvy k nej priexal mu (... i ustroil scenu.)

Former to her came husband ( and made a scene) (Trugman)

What is peculiar about this data in the light of the traditional classification outlined
in Section 2 is that the NP-split phenomenon does not apply to a natural class. It
is unexpected for the intersective, subsective, and privative adjectives to pattern
together in freely splitting, while the non-subsective modal adjectives have a much
more restricted participation in the NP-split.

4. PRINCIPLES OF INTERPRETATION
The hypothesis I propose is that Nowaks data tells us that adjectives fake and
imaginary arent actually privative, but subsective, and that no adjectives are actually
privative. In interpreting a question like (7b), repeated below, I hypothesize that we
actually expand the denotation of gun to include both fake and real guns.

(7) b. Is that gun real or fake?

In fact, even in (7a), it is reasonable to suppose that the first occurrence of gun,
modified by fake, is similarly coerced, whereas the second, unmodified, occurrence is not.

(7) a. A fake gun is not a gun.

Normally, in the absence of a modifier like fake or real, all guns are understood to
be real guns, as is evident when one asks how many guns the law permits each person
to own, for instance. Without the coerced expansion of the denotation of the noun, not
only would fake be privative, but the adjective real would always be redundant 3 .
Kamp and Partee (1995), in discussing the recalibration of adjective
interpretations in context, introduced a number of principles, including the following
Non-Vacuity Principle.

(30) Non-vacuity principle (NVP):

In any given context, try to interpret any predicate so that both its positive
and negative extension are non-empty. (Kamp and Partee 1995: 161)

The Non-Vacuity Principle applies not only to simple predicates but to

predicates formed by combination of an adjective and a noun: these should

18
 Emerita

be interpreted in such a way that the ADJ + N combination is a non-vacuous

predicate.
However, Kamp and Partee (1995) also argued, in part on the basis of clear
examples like (31), that in ADJ + N constructions, one first interprets the
noun in the given context (ignoring the adjective), and then recalibrates
the adjective as necessary. This principle is expressed as the Head Primacy
Principle in (32).

(31) a. giant midget (a midget, but an exceptionally large one)

b. midget giant (a giant, but an exceptionally small one)

(32) The Head primacy principle (HPP): In a modifier-head structure, the head is
interpreted relative to the context of the whole constituent, and the modifier
is interpreted relative to the local context created from the former context by
the interpretation of the head. (Kamp and Partee 1995: 161)

In many cases, the Non-Vacuity Principle and the Head Primacy Principle cooperate
to account for the observed results, including not only the examples in (31), but also
the fact that the truth of (33b) below is compatible with a non-redundant use of the
modifier in (33a).

(33) a. This is a sharp knife.

b. Knives are sharp. (Kamp and Partee 1995: 162)

If the Head Primacy Principle were absolute, the proposed shift in the interpretation
of the head noun under coercion by a privative adjective like fake or a tautologous
adjective like real would be impossible. But there are other examples as well that
suggest that the Head Primacy Principle is non-absolute. In particular, there is a large
and productive class of constitutive material modifiers that occur in examples like
stone lion, wooden horse, velveteen rabbit, rubber duck. In such examples we easily shift
nouns from their literal meaning to a meaning representation/model of .
The perspective of Optimality Theory suggests that we can account for this
situation by saying that the Non-Vacuity Principle outranks the Head Primacy Principle.
We normally try to obey both. But if there is no reasonable way to obey the Non-Vacuity
Principle without shifting the noun outside its normal bounds (as in the case of fake and
real), then it may be shifted in such a way as to make the compound predicate obey the
Non-Vacuity Principle. And if there is an extremely productive and easy shift of the
noun that makes it satisfy the Non-Vacuity Principle, as in the case of representations,
there too we can override the Head Primacy Principle.
So I suggest that no adjectives are privative (Partee in press). Normal adjectives
are always subsective, and there should be some ways to identify modal adjectives as
a special subclass, such that only they are not necessarily subsective.
If this hypothesis is correct, then the classification of adjectives can be much more
neatly constrained. Adjectives are still functions from properties to properties in the

19
Emerita

most general case, but in harmony with the traditional notion of modifiers, they are
normally constrained to be subsective. We still need to allow for the modal adjectives,
which are not so constrained; the Slavic NP-splitting data provide fuel for a proposal to
consider them syntactically as well as semantically distinct.

5. CONCLUSIONS
The adjective puzzles that I have been discussing illustrate several general principles.
One is that we need to study lexical semantics and principles of semantic composition
together; decisions about either may affect decisions about the other. More importantly,
while contextually influenced meaning shifts pose challenges for compositionality, we
can see that compositionality plays an essential role in constraining the kinds of meaning
shifts that take place. We hold the principle of compositionality constant in working out
(unconsciously) what shifts our interlocutors may be signaling. In the extreme case we
(like children) depend on compositionality to figure out the meanings of novel words:
if we can use contextual clues to guess what the whole sentence means, we can then
solve for the meaning of the unknown word. Compositionality thus appears to be one
of the most cognitively basic principles in the realm of semantics. While many important
questions in the field remain open, I believe that the principle of compositionality has
shown its value as a central working hypothesis guiding semantic research.

1 For my first introduction to Polish Split-NPs and answers to my first inquiries about them, I am grateful
to Anita Nowak. For further discussion and suggestions, I am grateful to Meredith Landman, Maria
Gouskova, Bozena Cetnarowska, Bozena Rozwadowska, Helen Trugman, Asya Pereltsvaig, Tanya Yanko, an
anonymous reviewer, and audiences at several previous discussions of this work.
This paper partially overlaps with several papers published or in press, including (Partee 1995, Partee 2007,
Partee 2009, Partee In press). This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation
under Grants No. BCS-9905748 and BCS-0418311 to Barbara Partee and Vladimir Borschev.
2 Tanya Yanko (p.c.) informs me that the contrastive topic actually has Intonation Contour IK-3 (with IK-1 on
the corresponding focus).
3 This property of real is noticed in passing by Lakoff (1987).

REFERENCES
Bai, M. 2004. Nominal Subextractions and the Structure of NPs in Serbian and English.
M.A. Thesis. Troms: University of Troms.
Clark, R.L. 1970. Concerning the Logic of Predicate Modifiers. Nous 4: 311-335.
Fanselow, G. & D. avar. 2002. Distributed deletion. In A. Alexiadou (ed.) Theoretical
Approaches to Universals. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 65-107.
Gouskova, M. 2000. The interaction of topic, focus and constituency in Russian. Ms., Amherst.
Junghanns, U. 2001. On rightward backgrounding. In G. Zybatow et al. (eds.) FDSL-3:
Current Issues in Formal Slavic Linguistics. Frankfurt-Main: Peter Lang, 329-343.
Kamp, H. 1975. Two theories about adjectives. In E.L. Keenan (ed.) Formal Semantics of
Natural Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 123-155.

20
 Emerita

Kamp, H. & B. Partee. 1995. Prototype theory and compositionality. Cognition 57: 129-191.
Kuerova, I. 2007. An anti-intervention effect in Czech splits: An argument for late
merge. In R. Compton et al. (ed.) Annual Workshop on Formal Approaches to Slavic
Linguistics. The Toronto Meeting 2006. Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Slavic Publications,
161-179.
Lakoff, G. 1987. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. Chicago and London: The University
of Chicago Press.
Melhorn, G. 2001. Information structure of discontinuous constituents in Russian. In G.
Zybatow et al. (eds.) Current Issues in Formal Slavic Linguistics (FDSL-3). Frankfurt/
Main: Lang, 344-352.
Montague, R. 1970a. English as a Formal Language. In B. Visentini et al. (eds.) Linguaggi
nella Societ e nella Tecnica. Milan: Edizioni di Comunit, 189-224.
Montague, R. 1970b. Universal grammar. Theoria 36: 373-398.
Montague, R. 1973. The proper treatment of quantification in ordinary English. In K.J.J.
Hintikka et al. (eds.) Approaches to Natural Language. Dordrecht: Reidel, 221-242.
Nowak, A. 2000. On split PPs in Polish. Ms. Amherst.
Parsons, T. 1970. Some problems concerning the logic of grammatical modifiers.
Synthese 21: 320-34.
Partee, B. 1995. Lexical semantics and compositionality. In L. Gleitman and M. Liberman
(eds.) An Invitation to Cognitive Science (Second Edition). Volume 1: Language.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 311-360.
Partee, B.H. 1979. Semantics - mathematics or psychology? In R. Buerle et al. (eds.)
Semantics from Different Points of View. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1-14.
Partee, B.H. 1996. The development of formal semantics in linguistic theory. In S. Lappin
(ed.) The Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 11-38.
Partee, B.H. 2007. Compositionality and coercion in semantics: The dynamics of
adjective meaning. In G. Bouma et al. (eds.) Cognitive Foundations of Interpretation.
Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 145-161.
Partee, B.H. 2009. The dynamics of adjective meaning. In A.E. Kibrik et al. (eds.)
Computational Linguistics and Intellectual Technologies: Papers from the Annual
International Conference Dialogue 2009 (Bekasovo, May 27-31, 2009). Moscow:
Russian State Humanities University, 593-597.
Partee, B.H. In press. Privative adjectives: subsective plus coercion. In R. Buerle et al.
(eds.) Presuppositions and Discourse. Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics
Interface. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Pereltsvaig, A. 2008. Split phrases in colloquial Russian. Studia Linguistica 62: 5-38.
Sekerina, I.A. 1997. The Syntax and Processing of Scrambling Constructions in Russian.
Ph.D. dissertation. New York: CUNY.
Siegel, M. 1976. Capturing the Russian adjective. In B.H. Partee (ed.) Montague Grammar.
New York: Academic Press, 293-309.
Siewierska, A. 1984. Phrasal discontinuity in Polish. Australian Journal of Linguistics 4:
57-71.
vedova, N.J. 1980. Russkaja grammatika. Moscow: Nauka/Akademija nauk SSSR, Institut
russkogo jazyka.

21
Emerita

SUMMARY
FORMAL SEMANTICS, LEXICAL SEMANTICS, AND COMPOSITIONALITY:
THE PUZZLE OF PRIVATIVE ADJECTIVES
The focus of the paper is the interaction of meaning and context with different
kinds of adjectives. Adjective meanings are shown to be more constrained than was
appreciated in earlier work. Facts about NP-splitting in Polish and Russian cast serious
doubt on the standard hierarchy of adjectives, and the data become much more orderly
if privative adjectives are reanalyzed as subsective adjectives. This revised account
requires the possibility of coerced expansion of the denotation of the noun to which an
adjective is applied. Compositionality can be seen as one of the driving forces in such
context-sensitive meaning shifts.

KEYWORDS: Formal semantics, compositionality, coercion, context-dependence,

adjectives, privative, subsective, Polish, Russian, NP-splits.

BRIEF CV
Barbara H. Partee is Distinguished University Professor of Linguistics and
Philosophy Emerita at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she continues
with part-time post-retirement teaching. She also teaches one course in formal
semantics each Spring semester in Moscow. She got her Ph.D. in 1965 with specialization
in syntax under Noam Chomsky at MIT, then while teaching at UCLA discovered the
logician Richard Montagues work; her calling then became the synthesis of Chomskyan
generative syntax with Montagues formal semantics, bringing formal semantics
increasingly into the field of linguistics. She has done joint work with Bach and Kratzer
on the semantic typology of quantification and with Hajiov and Sgall on topic, focus,
and quantification. Much of her most recent work is joint with her husband Vladimir
Borschev and Russian colleagues; their most recent topic has been the Russian Genitive
of Negation.

PROFESSIONAL BACKGROUND
Taught at UCLA 1965-1972, first Linguistics, then Linguistics and Philosophy.
Joined UMass Amherst faculty in 1972. Professor since 1973, department head 1987-93.
Emerita as of January 2004.
Taught at 1966, 1974, 1987, 1989, and 1991 LSA Summer Institutes.
Visiting Professorships at El Colegio de Mexico, Charles University, Prague, Moscow State
University, Russian State Humanities University, University of Leipzig, University of
Canterbury.
Board of Managers, Swarthmore College, 1990-2002.

22
 Emerita

HONORS AND AWARDS

Woodrow Wilson Fellow (Hon. 61), NSF Fellow (1961-65)
NSF grants, Co-P.I. or P.I., 1973-75, 1979-81, 1988-92, 1989-90, 1999-2003, 2004-08.
Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, 1976-77
Chancellors Medal, University of Massachusetts, 1977
Faculty Fellowship, University of Massachusetts, 1981-82
NEH Fellowship 1982-83
IREX Fellowships 1989, 1995
Fulbright Senior Lectureship 2000, 2005
President of Linguistic Society of America, 1986
Fellow:
American Academy of Arts and Sciences (elected 1984)
National Academy of Sciences (elected 1989)
American Association for the Advancement of Science (elected 1996)
Linguistic Society of America (2005)
Massachusetts Academy ofSciences (2008)
Max Planck Research Award jointly with Hans Kamp 1992-95
Foreign Member: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, elected 2002
Honorary doctorates: Swarthmore College (1989), Charles University (1992), Russian
State Humanities University (2001), Copenhagen Business School (2005)
Editorial Boards: Natural Language Semantics, Linguistics and Philosophy

23