On the nature of adjectives: evidence from Dinka

This paper presents a description of the adjective class in Dinka, and an exploration of its typological relevance to the existence of adjectives cross-linguistically. In Dinka, a subset of intransitive verbs can be defined by several morphophonological characteristics. The overwhelming majority of these are property concepts, despite the fact that the defining characteristics are unrelated to semantic properties. This suggests that property concepts provide a useful semantic context in the investigation of adjectives, even in languages where the adjective class is clearly a sub-class of another lexical category. While the analysis is based primarily on the Bor South dialect, it has been corroborated using evidence from other dialects. Therefore, it is likely that this characterization holds across the language.

Interpreting Historical-Philosophical Sources of Intellectual Property

This chapter considers the approach to traditional philosophical sources of intellectual property (IP). It argues that philosophical questioning is characterized by specific and unique features that distinguish it from all other forms of knowledge, including scientific knowledge. It then shows how philosophical concepts—i.e. concepts coined in the course of philosophical questioning—translate in other domains of knowledge, such as jurisprudence, where they eventually decay into empty rhetorical tools devoid of questioning force. The current ‘intellectual property debate’ illustrates this point. In this connection, the chapter questions how intellectual property concepts can be reconstructed in their original philosophical dimension. By way of example, the interpretation of three great philosophers—Kant, Fichte, and Hegel—is considered, by reference to their seminal writings on intellectual property issues.

Property concepts in Tabaq: More than one road can lead to Rome

In this paper, we investigate the interplay between the morphosyntactic class of adjectives, the semantics of property concepts, and the function of noun modification in Tabaq, a Kordofan Nubian language (Nilo-Saharan phylum) spoken in the north-west of the Nuba Mountains in Sudan. Tabaq has a small class of adjectives containing few semantic types, and playing only a limited role with respect to the core function of adjectives: the modification of nouns. By contrast, a large number of descriptive modifiers is derived from two other word classes, verbs and nouns, and this paper describes the different ways of coding property concepts in Tabaq.

Property concepts in Basaá and the ontology of gradability across category

Theories of gradability and comparison (e.g., Kamp 1975, Cresswell 1977 and many following) have been developed with data from familiar languages like English with adjectives at their core. In many languages, however, the main predicate in truth-conditionally equivalent constructions -- the property concept (PC) (cf. Dixon 1982) -- is of a different category: that of a nominal, which is predicated through possession cross-linguistically. Francez and Koontz-Garboden (2017) argue for a semantics for such nouns as mereologically and size-ordered sets of abstract portions, a treatment that keeps with their exhibition of mass noun behavior, with possessive predications and comparatives involving these nouns built on such a semantics. A semantics of this kind is not standardly assumed for adjectives and constructions built on them in familiar languages, however, raising the question whether the truth-conditional equivalence of the constructions with nouns in languages that have them and the constructions with adjectives in languages that have them should be model-theoretically represented, a position assumed by Menon and Pancheva (2014), or whether this equivalence should be captured in some other way. Based on data from modification, degree questions, subcomparatives, and equatives in Basaá (Bantu; Cameroon), we show that adjectives and the have+PC noun construction must in fact have a type-theoretically identical semantics.