Marcin Wšgiel (Palacky University, Olomouc)

Adjectives and kind modification

In this paper I discuss two types of adjectival modification in Polish, namely the semantics of prenominal and postnominal adjectives. I discuss different entailment patterns related to the placement of adjectival modifiers and the relationship between adjectives in both positions and genericity. I postulate a unified intersective semantics for both prenominal and postnominal adjectives and argue that they are predicates denoting properties of objects and kinds respectively. I posit that the kind area is associated with the NP and in the process of semantic composition nouns first combine with postnominal modifiers and then with prenominal ones. The proposal is based on the syntactic analysis of Rutkowski and Progovac (2005) and the semantic framework of McNally and Boleda (2004). Furthermore, taking Partee (2009, 2010) as a starting point I demonstrate how the analysis could be extended to capture the behavior of partitive adjectives in terms of kind modification and coercion.