Building Event-Based Ad Hoc Properties: On the Interpretation of Adjectival Passives

Abstract

The paper develops a new perspective on the semantics and pragmatics of adjectival passives that focuses on their characteristic context dependency. Adjectival passives are analyzed as a flexible grammatical means of creating a potentially new ad hoc property based on the verbal event by which the subject referent is categorized according to contextually salient goals. The post state vs. target state ambiguity of adjectival passives is accounted for by deriving the two readings from a semantically underspecified representation that requires the pragmatic machinery to infer a suitable contextual instantiation.