Vagueness and Language Use

Most of the expressions we use in ordinary language are vague, in the sense that their meaning does not allow us to specify a unique and constant boundary between the objects to which they apply and those to which they don't. An adjective like 'young', for instance, does not select for a sharp range of ages (does 29 still count as 'young'? what about 37, 43?); likewise a determiner like 'many' does not determine a precise number of objects in order to count as many. The phenomenon of vagueness raises substantial puzzles about how we reason and manage to communicate successfully with vague expressions. This volume brings together twelve papers by linguists and philosophers which contribute novel empirical and formal considerations to theorizing about vagueness, with special attention to the linguistic mechanisms by which vagueness is regulated. The volume is organized in three main parts which concern respectively: the link between vagueness, gradability and the expression of comparison in language (how does the meaning of the vague adjective 'young' relate to that of the precise comparative 'younger'?) the semantics of degree adverbs and intensifiers (how do adverbs like 'clearly', 'approximately' or 'surprisingly' constrain the meaning of the expressions they modify?) ways of evading the sorites paradox (what are the prospects for contextualist and pragmatic solutions?).