Fake reefs are sometimes reefs and sometimes not, but are always compositional

• DOI: 10.3765/elm.3.5813
• Publication Date: 2025-01-25T08:43:11Z
• Authors: Hayley Ross; Najoung Kim; Kathryn Davidson

The semantics of adjective modification often begins with set intersection,such that [[yellow flower]] = [[yellow]] ∩ [[flower]]. Thus a yellow flower is flower. Such an account, however, runs into problems for adjectives like fake or counterfeit, which display privative inference: gun not and counterfeit dollar dollar. Moreover, recent work shows privativity cannot easily be encoded as property specific since e.g. watch robustly licenses the subsective inference being (Martin 2022). We gather judgments on nearly 800 adjective-noun bigrams (of 180 are novel, i.e. zero corpus frequency), andshow depends adjective, noun context, can manipulated very same bigram by presenting it in different contexts. This poses challenge theories fix always use method composition (Partee 2010, del Pinal 2015). we find no difference participant behavior between novel high frequency ones, suggesting process nonetheless compositional result convention memorized idiosyncrasy. Our results support accounts Martin (2022) (which modifies 2015) Guerrini (2024), treat context-dependent.