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Share Paper 1469

Attributive Wrong
Bernhard Schwarz
362-370 (complete paper or proceedings contents)

Abstract

In ordinary "local" cases of adjectival modification, the adjective-noun sequence describes a first-order property whose content is fully determined by the contents of the adjective and the noun. Modification by wrong, however, is not local in this sense. For example, the truth conditions of the sentence I opened the wrong bottle are not a function of the property of being a wrong bottle. Larson (2000) derives non-locality in this case by equating non-local wrong with clause embedding wrong whose clausal complement has elided. This paper argues that non-local wrong cannot in fact be so analyzed and that its semantics should instead be reduced to that of clause embedding wrong in the lexicon.

Published in

Proceedings of the 25th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics
edited by Donald Baumer, David Montero, and Michael Scanlon
Table of contents
Printed edition: $375.00