Workshop on 'Modification (with & without modifiers)'

Modification is a process we often resort to, but which we have little understanding of. It has been identified it with the particular mode of composition that amounts to intersection (as in Heim & Kratzer's (1998) predicate modification). But then, predicate modifiers have also been treated since Siegel (1976) as properties of properties. And in the literature, we also see it used in a rather intuitive manner in expressions such as 'adverbial modification' or 'adjective modifier', where the term here seems to be closer to the concept of predication instead of the set-theoretic notion of intersection. In fact, intersection and predicate modification happen to be opposite ways of analyzing constructions, as in the case of relational adjectives (McNally & Boleda 2004) or Larson's (1998) 'beautiful dancer'.Much effort has been made lately to understand what modification is, especially when it comes to adjectives, adverbs and relative clauses. The purpose of this workshop is to work along the same lines and perhaps extend this picture by looking at new cases of modification and considering psycholinguistic as well as theoretical approaches and methodologies. We invite submissions in semantics and its interfaces (syntax, pragmatics, morphology, phonology) that focus on questions of a conceptual nature, but also (and especially) those that are concerned with under-described and/or cross-linguistic phenomena dealing with adjectives, adverbs, prepositional phrases, or intonation, to mention a few.