Glossa article published!

Professor Coppock’s contribution to a special volume of Glossa on “non-conservativity with precise proportions” edited by Uli Sauerland and Robert Pasternak is now out!

Although “percent” got famous for its non-conservative uses as in “The committee hired 30% WOMEN”, Coppock argues that we should approach the analysis of “percent” via simpler, predicative cases like “The solution is 30% acid”. Building on Pasternak’s analysis of how “percent” works in cases with closed-scale gradable adjectives like “30% full”, Coppock proposes a type shift that applies to a predicate like “acid” and yields a gradable predicate that tracks parthood of the subject. A small tweak needs to be made to the lexical entry for “percent”, too. Then there are some interesting cumulative-like uses, which Coppock analyzes in a dynamic framework that also helps to avoid the need for weird compositional mechanisms in the basic cases.