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date: 16 December 2019

Abstract and Keywords

Though vague phenomena have been studied extensively for many decades, it is only in recent years that researchers sought the support of quantitative data. This chapter highlights and discusses the insights that experimental methods brought to the study of vagueness. One area focused on are ‘borderline contradictions’, that is, sentences like ‘She is neither tall nor not tall’ that are contradictory when analysed in classical logic, but are actually acceptable as descriptions of borderline cases. The flourishing of theories and experimental studies that borderline contradictions have led to are examined closely. Beyond this illustrative case, an overview of recent studies that concern the classification of types of vagueness, the use of numbers, rounding, number modification, and the general pragmatic status of vagueness is provided.

Keywords: vagueness, gradability, categories, borderline cases, contradiction, valency, imprecision, hysteresis, pragmatics, semantics

Sam Alxatib

Sam Alxatib is Assistant Professor in Linguistics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He studied linguistics in Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, and in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is interested in semantic, pragmatic, and syntactic theory, and in methodological issues in linguistic research. He has worked on vague phenomena, gradability and degree semantics, the semantics of evaluativity, focus, tense, and aspect, and the interaction of aspect with modality.

Uli Sauerland

Uli Sauerland is Vice-Director and Head of the Semantics-Pragmatics department at the Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics (ZAS) in Berlin. His training was first in mathematics at the University of Konstanz, and then in linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He teaches regularly at the University of Potsdam and has taught at many universities as a visiting professor including the Universities of Vienna, Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro, Harvard, and Stanford. Uli’s goal is to understand the structures underlying human logical thought. To do so, he studies how thoughts are expressed in language, and how language is used to communicate thoughts.

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