Morzycki, Marcin. 2010. ‘Expressive Modification and the Licensing of Measure Phrases’. Appeared in 2011 in the Journal of Semantics 28(3): 401–411. A pre-publication draft is here. (This is identical to what was previously titled ‘Expressive Modifiers, Measure Phrases, and Degree Types’.) BibTeX

This squib points out that adjectives with measure phrases are incompatible with expressive modifiers such as goddamn. It shows that this otherwise mysterious fact can be explained relatively straightforwardly if, as Schwarzschild (2005) has argued, positive adjectives can support measure phrases only as the result of a type-shifting rule in the lexicon.

expressive meaning, adjectives, degree modification, measure phrases