Color, context, and compositionality

Color adjectives have played a central role in work on language typology and/nvariation, but there has been relatively little investigation of their meanings by researchers/nin formal semantics. This is particularly surprising given the fact that color terms have/nbeen at the center of debates in the philosophy of language over foundational questions,/nin particular whether the idea of a compositional, truth-conditional theory of natural language semantics is even coherent. The challenge presented by color terms is articulated in/nparticular detail in the work of Charles Travis. Travis argues that structurally isomorphic/nsentences containing color adjectives can shift truth value from context to context depending on how they are used and in the absence of effects of vagueness or ambiguity/polysemy,/nand concludes that a deterministic mapping from structures to truth conditions is impossible. The goal of this paper is to provide a linguistic perspective on this issue, which we/nbelieve defuses Travis’ challenge. We provide empirical arguments that color adjectives/nare in fact ambiguous between gradable and nongradable interpretations, and that this simple ambiguity, together with independently motivated options concerning scalar dimension/nwithin the gradable reading accounts for the Travis facts in a simpler, more constrained, and/nthus ultimately more successful fashion than recent contextualist analyses such as those in/nSzabó (2001) or Rothschild and Segal (forthcoming)