1 EXPRESSING SIMILARITY: ON SOME DIFFERENCES BETWEEN ADJECTIVES AND DEMONSTRATIVES1

Similarity is considered as fundamental in cognitive activities such as learning and categorization. This is reason to assume that it plays a prominent role in natural language, too. Ways to express similarity are given, e.g., by comparison constructions and by lexical items like similar, such, like, resemble. In Umbach & Gust (2014) the German demonstrative so (‘such ’ / ‘like that’) is investigated. It is argued that the demonstrative so expresses similarity, instead of identity, between the referent of the phrase and the target of the accompanying pointing gesture. As a result a similarity class is generated representing an ad-hoc kind. Demonstratives relating to their target by similarity instead of identity are called similarity demonstratives in Umbach & Gust. Such demonstratives are found across languages and include, e.g., English such, Polish tak and Turkish böyle. Given that there are demonstratives expressing similarity, the question arises of how these demonstratives relate to adjectives expressing similarity like English similar and German ähnlich (‘similar’) – are they equivalent in meaning? This paper focuses on German so/solch (‘such’) and ähnlich (‘similar’). The examples in (1) in fact suggest that they are equivalent – in (a) as well as (b) Anna is said to own a dress similar to the one pointed at by the speaker.2 1 I would like to thank the audience at IATL and my colleagues at ZAS, in particular Stephanie Solt and Anton Benz, for valuable comments. The research reported in this paper was financially supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG (UM 100/1-1). 2 German so in nominal phrases has a pre-determiner position like English such while the adjective ähnlich has a pre-nominal position. When comparing so and ähnlich in this paper, word order is neglected. This is justified by the fact that German solch, which is equivalent in meaning to so (even if slightly old-fashioned), can take both positions without change in meaning, cf. 2.3