Restrictiveness and the scope of adjectives

Abstract

I examine the compositional properties of nonrestrictive adjectives, those which are used not to identify referents but to provide additional information about them. By considering the interaction of nonrestrictive adjectives with non-intersective adjectives like 'other', I argue that some nonrestrictive adjectives must take scope over the DP they modify, following Potts (2005). I extend the analysis to account for nonrestrictively modified quantifier phrases, using an anaphoric semantics in line with recent approaches to nominal appositives (e.g. Nouwen 2014), whereby nonrestrictive modifiers are anaphoric to the entity they modify. I provide a compositional dynamic fragment based on Charlow (2014, 2015) that account for a variety ofsentences with nonrestrictive adjectives.