True Precision Required. Adjectives of Veracity in Spanish as Imprecision Regulators

Abstract

[eng] The aim of this paper is to offer an analysis of adjectives of veracity in Spanish (verdadero ‘true’, aut´entico ‘authentic’) that accounts for their modification of nouns in terms of imprecision regulation. Slack regulators are elements that signal the intended degree of precision in the use of an expression to describe a situation. In order to account for this fact, I will adopt [26]’s framework, which allows to directly compare and modify degrees along a scale of imprecision. Under this framework, expressions denote sets of alternatives whose size depends on the degree of precision of the context. Verdadero and aut´entico are argued to be degree modifiers affecting this scale of imprecision by setting the degree of precision of the context to a high value, forcing the modified noun to be interpreted in a strict sense.