Constructions, pragmatics and modality

Abstract

This paper rejects the commonplace view that the semantics of certain modal deverbal adjectives (MDAs), which have traditionally been assumed to be non-compositional, require complex lexical or syntactic encoding (cf. e.g. Riehemann 1994 and 1998, Booij 2007 and 2010a). Instead, it shows that productive MDA formation is semantically compositional, and that the prima facie idiosyncratic meanings are, in fact, conversational implicatures.

Keywords

• modal deverbal adjectives
• compositionality
• conversational implicatures
• morphology-semantics interface