| dc.description.abstract | It is a well-known but little-studied fact that evaluative
adverbs - adverbs indicating the attitude of the speaker towards the
information she is conveying - can modify degree ('incredibly tall',
'ridiculously expensive'...). This thesis offers a syntactosemantic
account of evaluative degree modi fication of both gradable adjectives
and gradable nouns.
Following Morzycki (2004), I propose that evaluative degree
modi fication involves a covert operator (which I will call EVAL);
however, my proposal differs from that of Morzycki in several crucial
respects. Most importantly, I argue that evaluative degree
constructions should not be analysed as embedded exclamatives.
Furthermore, I show how their syntactic behaviour illuminates their
semantic composition, using evidence from different phenomena in both
English and Dutch.
Subsequently, I examine the linguistic evidence for the gradability of
certain nouns, like 'idiot', 'nerd', 'genius', 'Barbie doll
enthusiast', and 'weirdo', and conclude that they, like gradable
adjectives, have a degree argument. I show how this class of gradable
nouns may be defined in prototype-theoretic terms. Morzycki (2009)
has shown that gradable nouns can be modified by size adjectives like
'big' and 'enormous'; I extend his account by including degree
modification by evaluative adjectives.
Finally, several suggestions for further research are offered. | |
