This book presents a new theory of the relationship between vagueness, context-sensitivity, gradability, and scale structure in natural language. Heather Burnett proposes a new formal reasoning system called DelTCS in which she sets out a completely new theory of gradable linguistic constructions.

• 1: Introduction


• 2: Vagueness and linguistic analysis


• 3: Context-sensitivity and vagueness patterns


• 4: The Delineation TCS framework


• 5: Scale structure in Delineation Semantics


• 6: Beyond Delineation Semantics


• 7: Beyond the adjectival domain


• 8: Conclusion

Heather Burnett is a CNRS researcher in the Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle at l'Université Paris 7-Denis Diderot. In 2012, she completed her PhD thesis in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles under the supervision of Edward Keenan and Dominique Sportiche. From 2012-2014, she was a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at l'Université de Montréal; from 2014-2015, she was a CNRS postdoctoral researcher at l'Université de Toulouse 2-Jean Jaurès; and in 2015, she was a Banting postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto. Her work on formal semantics, formal syntax, and language variation and change has appeared in Linguistic Variation, Linguistics and Philosophy, and Journal of Semantics.