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Martin Schäfer

Classifying Adjective-Noun combinations conundrum of the day: Are unwritten
laws laws? Hours later, I remembered that it is rather similar to examples like
"fake gun" or "paper airplane" from the classic and
literature. Unfortunately, I also remember that the
classic literature does not really solve these issues. Kamp &
Partee (1995) note the "apparent context dependence of judgments about
whether a fake gun is a gun". And I liked Nick Asher's (2011) ruminations on
"paper airplane" so much that I quoted it in full in my habilitation, see below.

Screenshot of a quote from Nick Asher, taken from Schäfer (2018:123): "I am not sure whether a paper airplane is an airplane. If one thinks of air- planes as having certain necessary parts like an engine or on board means of locomotion, then most paper airplanes aren’t airplanes. On the other hand, many people tell me that their intuitions go the other way." (Asher 2011: 302).
Dec 18, 2023, 05:27 PM·Public·Web
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Martin Schäfer

Probably all of Mastodon is excitedly waiting for the exact
references, so here you go:

Asher, Nicholas. 2011. Lexical meaning in context: A web of words. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

Kamp, Hans & Barbara H. Partee. 1995. Prototype theory and compositionality.
Cognition 57. 129–191.

And my habilitation :):
Schäfer, Martin (2018). The semantic transparency of English compound nouns. Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1134594

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