Semantics etc.

Caroline Heycock. “On the interaction of adjectival modifiers and relative clauses”:http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/mJlMTA3N/. Draft. 15th October 2003

bq. In this paper I [argue] that the central cases of “low” readings for adjectival modifiers of a noun that is further modified by a relative clause occur with modifiers that generate negative entailments. These entailments may further license the “short-circuited implicatures” referred to as Neg Raising (Horn 1989), and it is this phenomenon which is responsible for the “low” interpretations. Unquestionably many mysteries remain (how Neg Raising should be formalised is a notoriously difficult problem), but at the least this view models with some accuracy the otherwise surprisingly limited distribution of these readings. In Bhatt 2002 it is argued that the low readings are the result of reconstruction of the noun and the modifier into the relative clause, and hence that they constitute evidence for the “raising analysis” of relative clauses. If I am correct, such reconstruction is not necessary to account for the interpretations available; and in fact if it necessarily gives rise to “low” readings the system will overgenerate massively. Whether or not this constitutes evidence against the raising analysis of relative clauses depends on whether this analysis really does entail the existence of low readings. If it does, the facts presented here suggest that it must be revised.

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