Title: The English suffix -ish as a degree head
Speaker: Ayaka Sugawara
Date/Time: Thursday Mar 1, 10:00AM-11:30AM
Location: 32-D831
In this talk, I would like to discuss the semantics of the English suffix -ish. Little theoretical work has been done on the nature of the English suffix -ish, whose suffixation is highly productive (see Morris (2009) for descriptive work). Intuitively -ish modifies the degree of the base it appends to. Contrary to this naive view, I will argue that -ish is a degree head of type ⟨⟨d, ⟨e, t⟩⟩, ⟨e, t⟩⟩ (cf. “pos” of Kennedy (2007)). I will also discuss the consequences of this analysis on the semantic theory of gradable adjectives, especially their scale structures and the semantics of their positive forms. I will focus on -ish in Adjective-ish, but would like to discuss briefly Adverb-ish (such as now-ish or ?regularly-ish) and Noun-ish (such as childish or toy-ish).