The Landscape of Vagueness

This paper investigates the grammatical principles governing the inter-pretation of vague predicates, focusing on the context dependence of the ‘standard of comparison ’ with respect to which gradable predicates are judged to be true. I argue that the range of variability in interpretation of the standard is larger than has generally been assumed, and that there are distinct types of standards but that this variability can be traced to lexical and grammatical properties of different classes of gradable predicates.