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
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
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
- 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?
- putting a hidden variable in the denotation of color adjectives
- treating color adjectives as full-blown indexical predicates
- → There is an underlying ambiguity, which accounts for both Lisa and Mary
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
Explanatory Video
Test your general knowledge
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.
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.
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
Back to the Semantics 2 page.