'Just' as a scale widener with maximum-standard adjectives: emphatic / precisifying effects

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a finer-grained classification of adjectives labeled Maximum Standard Adjectives (MSAs) in order to account for two of their properties in interaction with the particle 'just'. First is the failure of non-extreme MSAs ('clean', 'closed' etc.) to be interpreted emphatically with 'just' – in contrast to MSAs like 'perfect' (Beltrama, 2021). The second property has to do with the non-uniform availability of a precisifying reading for MSAs in combination with focused 'just'. While we assume (like Rotstein and Winter, 2004 and Lassiter and Goodman, 2013) that threshold values for MSAs are uniformly provided by the context, we show that MSAs also vary with respect to how these thresholds are sourced from the context. The non-uniform behavior of MSAs with 'just' in its emphatic and precisifying uses is shown to derive from this variability.