On the Semantics of Domain Adjectives in English

Jesse Harris

This paper addresses the semantics of domain adjectives in English, i.e. adjectives like possible which may appear either prenominally (every possible abstract) or postnominally (every abstract possible). I present novel data regarding (a) with which determiners such adjectives are licensed and (b) the lexical restrictions on the class of adjectives participating in the alternation. As these data pose serious complications for present analyses, I propose an original compositional analysis in which domain adjectives restrict the domain of objects in the nuclear scope of the quantificational structure of the determiner to just those objects provided by a resource situation in the determiner.

Click here for the full abstract.