Although the traditional focus of research into degree modification has been the adjectival extended projection, it has long been recognized that degree modification or something quite like it is possible in other categories as well (Bolinger 1972, Abney 1987, Deutjes 1997, Kennedy and McNally 2004, a.o.). The conditions under which it is possible, though, and mechanisms that bring it about remain largely mysterious. In this talk, I’ll examine one peculiar species of such modification, exemplified by that enormous idiot or a big beer-drinker, in which a size adjective characterizes a degree associated with the modified noun. Across a number of languages, these readings manifest two intriguing properties, apparently not previously noted: they are possible prenominally but not postnominally, and systematically with adjectives that predicate bigness but not with ones that predicate smallness. I’ll consider two ways of thinking about how this phenomenon comes about. One of these builds on the intuition that the contextually-supplied standards relative to which gradable predicates are evaluated cannot vary as widely in the nominal domain as elsewhere. The other approach begins instead with the idea that the contrast between adjectives of bigness and adjectives of smallness observed here is analogous to cross-polar anomaly (Kennedy 1997, Kennedy 2001, Winter 2004, a.o.). Both

1. Program goal: incorporating content words into a model of entailment One of the most important properties of human languages is their ability to convey intricate meanings. The vastness and effectiveness of those meanings for everyday communication and reasoning transcends all known non-human languages, including other animal languages and artificial languages. For studying communication and reasoning in language, an indispensable empirical concept is entailment: the relation between premises and valid conclusions expressed as natural language sentences. Entailment relations may appear between sentences due to the presence of words and expressions like other, either…or, not or exactly five, whose meanings have been studied in logical frameworks since antiquity. However, entailments may also appear due to semantic properties of “non-logical ” words like parrot, hug, far or knowledge. Such content words constitute the bulk of the lexicon in all natural languages. Without considering them, it is simply impossible to understand entailment phenomena and human reasoning in general. However, while content words have played an important role in cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence, their meanings have turned out to be richer