Degrees and kind reference across categories
Paradoxically, perhaps, one of the perennial questions in degree semantics is what precisely degrees are: equivalence classes (Cresswell 1976, others), or points on an abstract scale (Seuren 1973, von Stechow 1984, lots of others), or intervals on such a scale (Kennedy 1997, Schwarzschild & Wilkinson 2002, others), or tropes (concrete instantiations of properties; Moltmann 2009), or indeed none of these. This talk approaches this familiar question from an unfamiliar empirical angle. Building on observations in Landman & Morzycki 2003, I’ll show that across many languages, degree morphemes have homophones in other categories that manipulate kinds or manners. In English, these include _as_ (_as tall_, _behave as he did_, _such people as him_) and _how_ (_how tall_, _how did he behave?_). Other languages provide even clearer examples. These connections are too deep and systematic to be accidental, and they are not expected on standard assumptions about the ontology of degrees. To make sense of the kind-manner connection, Landman & Morzycki propose that manners are Carlsonian kinds of events. The aim of this talk is to develop a means of representing degrees as kinds of states, and to use it to provide a compositional semantics that sheds light on the cross-categorial parallels. This converges with the analytical direction pursued for independent reasons in Moltmann 2009 on the conclusion that degrees are more complicated objects than is usually assumed. Taking this step puts a variety of degree constructions in a different light, and may provide traction on some otherwise recalcitrant puzzles.