First Published in 1999

The main argument presented in this volume is that gradable adjectives like bright, dense, and short denote measure functions—functions from objects to abstract representations of measurement, or scales and degrees.

This proposal is shown to provide a foundation for principled explanations of a wide range of syntactic and semantic properties of gradable adjectives and the constructions in which they appear, ranging from the syntactic distribution of gradable adjectives to the scopal characteristics of comparatives and the empirical effects of adjectival polarity.