As an argument in favor of the (minority) view that adjectives involve a neo-Davidsonian state argument, I argue that it grounds an analysis of the English Determiner + Adjective construction (the old). On its " individuated" reading (the old are generally happier), this construction seems to refer to old individuals; on its "mass" reading (the old is never ordinary), to something like oldness. Empirically, this paper uses naturally-occurring data to show that both readings are more productive than sometimes suggested. Theoretically, the two readings are parsimoniously derived by existentially closing off one or the other of the two arguments (the individual argument x, the state argument s) made available by the state analysis-λxλs[old(s) ∧ holder(x,s)]-deriving a predicate of individuals for the individuated reading, and a predicate of states for the mass reading. This account of Determiner + Adjective further reflects the philosophical idea that properties can be construed as predicates of individuals or as the abstract thing that those individuals share; and connects to other ways of nominalizing both verb phrases and adjectives.

The nature of the relationship between the head and modifier in English noun compounds has long posed a challenge to semantic theories. We argue that the type of head-modifier relation in an English endocentric noun-headed compound depends on how its referent is categorized: specifically, on whether the referent is conceptualized as an artifact, made by humans for a purpose; or as a natural kind, existing independently of humans. We propose the Events vs. Essences Hypothesis: the modifier in an artifact-headed compound typically refers to an event of use or creation associated with that artifact, while the modifier in a natural kind-headed compound typically makes reference to inherent properties reflective of an abstract essence associated with the kind, such as its perceptual properties or native habitat. We present three studies substantiating this hypothesis. First, in a corpus of almost 1,700 attested compounds in two conceptual domains (food/cooking and precious minerals/jewelry), we find that as predicted, compound names referring to artifacts tend to evoke events, whereas compound names referring to natural kinds tend to evoke essential properties. Next, in a production experiment involving compound creation and a comprehension experiment involving compound interpretation, we find that the same tendencies also extend to novel compounds.

Which normally transitive verbs can omit their objects in English (I ate), and why? This article explores three factors suggested to facilitate object omission: (i) how strongly a verb selects its object (Resnik 1993); (ii) a verb's frequency (Goldberg 2005); (iii) the extent to which the verb is associated with a routine – a recognized, conventional series of actions within a community (Lambrecht & Lemoine 2005; Ruppenhofer & Michaelis 2010; Levin & Rapaport Hovav 2014; Martí 2010, 2015). To operationalize (iii), this article compares the writings of different communities to offer corpus and experimental evidence that verbs omit their objects more readily in the communities in which they are more strongly associated with a routine. More broadly, the article explores how the meaning and syntactic potential of verbs are shaped by the practices of the people who use them.

Within the United States, dialectal variation is often characterized by vowel shifts: systematic differences in vowels' relative qualities and vowel-inherent dynamics. The African American Vowel Shift (AAVS), in particular, includes raising and fronting of front lax /ɪ ɛ æ/, among other features. The more recent pan-regional Low Back Merger Shift (LBMS), by contrast, includes lowering and backing of the same vowels. We evaluate these two shifts in an audio corpus of over 40 Black speakers from the Southern state of Georgia. Speakers, born between the 1930s and 2000, represent five demographic generations. Normalized formant values (F1,F2) from five temporal points per token are input to Generalized Additive Mixed Models (GAMMs). We test for significant changes in vowels' trajectories across time by fitting Year of Birth as a continuous smooth term. Additionally, we use linear mixed-effects modeling to test for raising versus lowering on the (F2–F1) front-vowel diagonal, across generations. Evidence from GAMMs and linear modeling indicates raised positions of /ɪ ɛ æ/ among older generations (1950s–1980s), followed by significant retraction from 1990–2000. These acoustic results are consistent with strengthening of the AAVS in the third quarter of the 20th Century, followed by a rapid transition to the pan-regional LBMS.

Abstract. The boxes are heavy can convey that each box is heavy (distributive), or that some individually light boxes qualify as heavy when lifted together (nondistributive; Schwarzschild 1996, Schwarzschild 2011). In contrast, the boxes are fragile generally requires each box to be fragile (distributive). Which adjectives behave like heavy or like fragile, and why? This paper proposes a measurementtheoretic account. For a gradable adjective to be understood nondistributively, I argue that a⊕b must exceed a and b along the scale associated with the adjective. That way, the contextual standard θ for what 'counts as' (adjective) in the context can be set in such a way that the composite object a⊕b surpasses the contextual standard θ while a and b individually fall short of it -a nondistributive understanding, in that the adjective is true of a⊕b together but not of a or b individually. This ordering is possible for heavy but not fragile, deriving their differences. More generally, researchers agree that an adjective's potential for distributivity depends on what we know about the property it describes. Making that idea more explanatory, this paper articulates which features of the property described by the adjective matter for distributivity and why.