True Precision Required

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to offer an analysis of adjectives of veracity in Spanish (verdadero ‘true’, auténtico ‘authentic’) that accounts for their modification of nouns in terms of imprecision regulation. Slack regulators are elements that signal the intended degree of precision in the use of an expression to describe a situation. In order to account for this fact, I will adopt [26]’s framework, which allows to directly compare and modify degrees along a scale of imprecision. Under this framework, expressions denote sets of alternatives whose size depends on the degree of precision of the context. Verdadero and auténtico are argued to be degree modifiers affecting this scale of imprecision by setting the degree of precision of the context to a high value, forcing the modified noun to be interpreted in a strict sense.

I would like to thank audiences at ESSLLI 2013 Student Session and UiL OTS seminar in Utrecht for their feedback. I am grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. I also thank Violeta Demonte, Carme Picallo, Elena Castroviejo, Camelia Constantinescu, Rick Nouwen, and Galit Sassoon for helpful discussion. All remaining errors are my own. This research has been partially supported by research project FFI2012-32886, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, and by grant FPU2010-6022 from the Spanish Ministry of Education.