Contemporary research in compositional, truth-conditional semantics often takes judgments of the relative unacceptability of certain phrasal combinations as evidence for lexical semantics. For example, observing that completely full sounds perfectly natural whereas completely tall does not has been used to motivate a distinction whereby the lexical entry for full but not for tall specifies a scalar endpoint. So far, such inferences seem unobjectionable. In general, however, applying this methodology can lead to dubious conclusions. For example, observing that slightly bent is (...) natural but slightly cheap is not (that is, not without a “too cheap” interpretation) leads researchers to suggest that the interpretation of bent involves a scalar minimum but cheap does not, contra intuition—after all, one would think that what is minimally cheap is (just) free. Such claims, found in sufficient abundance, raise the question of how we can support semantic theories that posit properties of entities that those entities appear to lack. This paper argues, using theories of adjectival scale structure as a test case, that the (un)acceptability data recruited in semantic explanations reveals properties of a two-stage system of semantic interpretation that can support divergences between our semantic and metaphysical intuitions. (shrink)

In linguistics, the dominant approach to the semantics of plurals appeals to mereology. However, this approach has received strong criticisms from philosophical logicians who subscribe to an alternative framework based on plural logic. In the first part of the article, we offer a precise characterization of the mereological approach and the semantic background in which the debate can be meaningfully reconstructed. In the second part, we deal with the criticisms and assess their logical, linguistic, and philosophical significance. We identify four (...) main objections and show how each can be addressed. Finally, we compare the strengths and shortcomings of the mereological approach and plural logic. Our conclusion is that the former remains a viable and well-motivated framework for the analysis of plurals. (shrink)