SoSe15: Term paper project: Color Adjectives

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Participants

• Valerie Dingeldey
• Luisa Schnelker

Short description of the project

• Showing a scenario in text and video
• Summary of Kennedy & McNally text "Color, Context and Compositionality"
• Provision of an explanatory video
• Testing knowledge on text
• Exercises
• Important: In our world, it is possible to have naturally blue hair!

Produced material

Scenario

Lisa has brown hair. She is a big fan of Katy Perry and dyes her hair blue. If she now says her hair is blue, she speaks the truth.
Her friend Mary is a biologist and studies hair. She calls Lisa to be a participant in her study on naturally blue hair. When Lisa now says she has blue hair and can participate in the study, she speaks falsehood.

Key Points of Kennedy & McNally Text

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Scenario

• as the scenario shows: Lisa and Mary are in the same scenario, but they have distinct utterances of the world → they also have distinct truth values (problem occurs when two people speak in a differnt context about the same object)
• important utterance of the scenario: The hair is blue.
• there has to be an underlying or lexical ambiguity
• sentences need necessary conditions under which they may be true
• to deny the judgements will be not an option here
• what is an option?

1. putting a hidden variable in the denotation of color adjectives
2. treating color adjectives as full-blown indexical predicates

• → There is an underlying ambiguity, which accounts for both Lisa and Mary

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The indexical responses

1. Hidden variables

• creating a parameter, whose value can be changed in different ways in different contexts
• denotation/logical form of blue: blue(P, C, x)
• →C=Comparison Class
• →P=Variable that picks out the part of x that the property represented by blue is applied to in order to assess truth (P's value can be setted in the right way)

• BUT: the judgements about The hair is blue remain the same. While Lisa accepts her hair to be blue because she dyed it this way, Mary would call her a liar because she only accepty naturally blue hair.

2. Indexical predicates

• color adjectives are full-blown indexical predicates that denote distinct properties in different contexts of utterance
• different use of color terms: for example Lisa's use of blue = blueᵢ(x) → For any x, blueᵢ(x) is true in a context Cᵢ iff (if and only if) x is blue according to the standard of blueness
• objects can be a certain color in differen ways
• problem: How do we understand blue? Naturally blue or painted/dyed blue?
• there is some flexibility in interpretation of color adjectives

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Color adjectives are ambiguous

1. Degree of color

• we consider that Lisa now dyes her hair in different shades of blue and she has another friend, who is an chemist and is just interestend to examine different blue haircolors (in comparison to Mary, the biologist)
• to distinguish different uses of color adjectives we need the interaction with comparative and degree morphology
  • hue
  • saturation
  • brightness
  • extent of color
• it is irrelevant why something is a certain color → relevant: relative degrees of some objective manifestation of color, namely objects on the basis of why they are a certain color or how they got a certain color
• gradable/nongradable distinction is a matter of meaning

2. Classification by color

• having the property denoted by the color adjective is crucially correlated with having some other property or properties which

are relevant for some purpose or other

• correlations constitute the basis for classifying objects → either a correlation exists or not (it is not a matter of degree)
  • examples for classificatory use of colors:
    • biologist's use of the blue (for her it only matters if the hair is naturally blue)
    • white wine counts as being white without being really white
    • there is nothing that is less blue, but only not blue
• color adjectives used for classifying objects are not gradable
• there is a certain amount of indeterminacy in how an object that has a classificatory color property might manifest a physically observable color (blue hair, for example can become grey with age)
• there are relations between manifested colors and correlated property

3. Color quantity and color quality

• gradable interpretation of colors
• dimensions
  • color quantity
    • How much of an object is the relevant color (completely, half,...)?
    • P=Part
  • color quality
    • a measurement of the proximity to a prototype (degree of hue, color saturation, brightness,...)
    • C=Comparison (context dependent component)
• the less a color predominates on an object, the less likely we will describe the object with this color
• nongradable + classificatory meaning vs. gradable + quality/quantity meaning
• semantic difference between gradable and nongradable color is both a matter of meaning (content) and semantic type → it constitutes a case of ambiguity

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A Semantic for color terms

• color adjectives can be also seen as nouns → color nouns=mass nouns
• blue (or colors in general) is a constant for type e (entity)
• classification of colors is an aspect of the truth conditions that remains constant no matter how we fix value of Pᵢ (which is the correlated property)
• different readings:
  • quantity reading: How much of the object manifests the color?
  • quality reading: How closely does the object's manifestation of the color approximate the appropriate prototype?

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Conclusions

• we have distinct terms in each of the two relevant utterances of The hair is blue
• they correspond to utterances of distinct sentences, which convey distinct propositions, and there is no expectation that they should have the same truth conditions

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Test your general knowledge

Point added for a correct answer:
Points for an incorrect answer:
Ignore the questions' coefficients:

Answer the questions with yes or no!

yes	no
		Is there an ambiguity in the sentence: The hair is blue?
		Is there the option of denying the judgements, namely claiming that the meaning of a color is so vague that both persons speak the truth?
		In the biologist’s understanding, is Lisa’s hair color gradable?
		Is Mary's use of color blue gradable?
		Does it matter why an object is a certain color?

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2. What does matter? (write on a sheet of paper and compare)

Check your answer

Relative degrees of some objective manifestation of color, e.g. hue, saturation, brightness.

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3. What does C stand for and where does it belong to? (write on a sheet of paper and compare)

Check your answer

Comparison class; quality gradability.

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4. What does P stand for and where does it belong to? (write on a sheet of paper and compare)

Check your answer

Variable that picks out part of x; quantity gradability.

Exercises

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