Two Types of Vagueness
Uli Sauerland, Penka Stateva · Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks · 2011
This chapter is about vagueness in natural language semantics. More specifically, we discuss lexical means of making vague assertions more or less precise in compositional semantics. Examples of expressions that have this effect are approximately, absolutely, definitely , and roughly speaking . While many of these expressions are modifiers and adverbs, some such expressions are neither. Hence, for the purposes of this chapter we call expressions that make vague assertions more or less precise approximators . Our main claim is that the distribution of such expressions provides evidence for the view that vagueness in language comes in at least two varieties, which we call scalar vagueness and epistemic vagueness.