Scale exhaustivity and the Modification Condition

Abstract

This paper pursues a Vector Space Semantics (VSS) analysis of evaluative and extreme adjectives in absolute and comparative constructions, with a particular emphasis on the licensing of measure phrases (MPs) in these environments. I show that the Modification Condition (Winter 2005), which restricts the distribution of MPs with locative/directional PPs and dimensional adjectives, can be extended to account for MP licensing with evaluative and extreme adjectives as well. Importantly, the non-satisfaction of the Modification Condition is entailed when a set of vectors does not exhaust the range of possible values on a particular scale. This observation thus allows us to link a long-standing generalization that scale exhaustivity and MP licensing are crucially related (Bierwisch 1989) with the formal denotational properties of certain linguistic expressions.