Theories of laryngeal realism (Honeybone 2005, Iverson & Salmons 1995, Beckman et al. 2011) argue for a tight correspondence between a segment’s phonetic cues and the (laryngeal) phonological features that represent it. Consequently, the ‘p’/‘b’ contrast in French, expressed phonetically by vocal fold vibration during the stop closure is represented by a [voice] feature whereas the ‘p’/‘b’ cont...

This paper investigates the approximative nature of -ish, which takes its origin in de-adjectival adjectives Middle English and from there spreads to -ish-derivatives a wide array bases, terms both categoriality complexity. Drawing on data TV corpus, charts inventory ‑ish-derivatives expressing senses zooms derivatives (largish, small-er-ish), de-numeral (fourth-ish, 2.8-ish), as well non-categ...

If the healthy and the pathological are not merely judgments qualifiers, but real phenomena, it must be possible to define both of them positively, which, in this context, means as factual contraries. On the other hand, only a privative definition, either of the pathological as 'non-healthy', or of the healthy as 'non-pathological', can rationally circumscribe all possible states of an organism...

The need to distinguish two syntactic sources for adnominal adjectives (a direct modification and a relative clause one), with the associated interpretive properties, turns out to have certain implications for the semantic classification of adjectives. We will see that it provides evidence for the existence of a class of truly privative adjectives, and for the conclusion that subsective adjecti...