Frequency adjectives and assertions about event types

In this paper we present a semantics for a little-studied and problematic class of adjectives, the so-called frequency adjectives (FAs), such as occasional and rare. FAs have been associated with three different readings, which we descriptively label the internal reading, the generic reading, and the adverbial reading, following the literature (Stump 1981, Larson 1998, Zimmermann 2003, Schäfer 2007). The INTERNAL READING is typically found when the FA modifies a deverbal, participant-denoting noun. On this reading, [FA N] can roughly be paraphrased as “N who/that V’s/is V’d FA-ly”, as exemplified in (1).