Berit Gehrke: Towards a unified semantics for frequency adjectives

Frequency adjectives (FAs) such as occasional and rare intuitively characterise events. However, they combine not only with nouns that reference events (e.g. agentive nouns like sailor in (1), deverbal nouns like destruction, or non-derived nouns referring to something like an event, e.g. trip), but also with nouns that do not make reference to an event by themselves (see (2)). In addition, they can induce three different readings ((1)-(3)) (Stump 1981; Larson 1998; Zimmermann 2003; Schäfer 2007).

(1) internal reading
That claim was made by an occasional sailor.
= That claim was made by someone who sails occasionally.

(2) generic reading
a. An occasional beer is good for you.
= Drinking a beer occasionally is good for you.
b. An occasional beer tastes good on a hot day.
≠ Drinking a beer occasionally tastes good on a hot day.

(3) adverbial reading (first observed in Bolinger 1967)
The/an occasional sailor strolled by.
= Occasionally, a sailor strolled by.

In particular the adverbial reading poses composition problems, since the FA appears to scope outside of the nominal it occurs in, which is not true for e.g. (1) or (2-a). The challenge is to account for each of these (sub)readings with an analysis that provides a unified semantics for the adjective on all readings, and keeps the syntax simple. More specifically, we want to account for the adverbial reading without having to treat the FA on this reading as a determiner, and thus essentially different from FAs on the other readings (cp. Stump 1981; Larson 1998; Zimmermann 2003). We will show that a unified account is possible, if we assume that some sentences constitute descriptions of event types rather than event tokens, as is usually assumed on event semantic analyses.

References
Bolinger, Dwight (1967). Adjectives in English: Attribution and predication. Lingua 18:1-34.
Larson, Richard (1998). Events and modification in nominals. D. Strolovitch and A. Lawson (eds.), Proceedings from SALT VIII, 145-168. CLC Publication, Ithaca, NY.
Schäfer, Roland (2007). On frequency adjectives. E. Puig Waldmüller (ed.),
Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 11, 555-567. Universitat Pompeu Fabra,
Barcelona.
Stump, Gregory T. (1981). The interpretation of frequency adjectives. Linguistics and Philosophy 4:221-257.
Zimmermann, Malte (2003). Pluractionality and complex quantifier formation. Natural Language Semantics 11:249-287.