TY  - JOUR
A1  - Bowler, Margit
ED  - Grubic, Mira
ED  - Mucha, Anne
T1  - The status of degrees in Warlpiri
JF  - Proceedings of the Semantics of African, Asian and Austronesian Languages (TripleA) 2
N2  - Recent work in semantics has shown that languages can vary in whether or not they include degrees (that is, elements of type < d >) in their semantic ontology. Several authors have argued that their languages of study lack degrees, including Bochnak (2013) for Washo (isolate, USA), Pearson (2009) for Fijian (Austronesian, Fiji), and Beck, et al. (2009) for Motu (Austronesian, Papua New Guinea). In this paper, I follow the tests proposed in Beck, et al. (2009) to assess the status of degrees in Warlpiri (Pama-Nyungan, Australia).
I use Warlpiri data collected following the Beck, et al. survey to argue that Warlpiri gradable predicates do not combine with a degree argument. (Like many other Australian languages, adjectival concepts like big and small are expressed using nouns in Warlpiri (Dixon 1982, Bittner & Hale 1995, among others). I refer to these lexical items as “gradable predicates” in this paper.) This paper represents a first pass at assessing the status of degrees in an Australian language, which have otherwise been unexamined from the point of view of degree semantics.
Y1  - 2016
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-92295
SP  - 1
EP  - 17
ER  -