Prenominal adjectives as conventional implicatures

This thesis focuses on the descriptive reading of adjective-noun constituents, in which the property expressed by the adjective provides a general comment on the entire set of items denoted by the noun. The analysis we propose stems from the observation that this descriptive, generalized comment can be paraphrased by means of parenthetical relative clauses, whose contribution has been analyzed by Potts as introducing a conventional implicature. In Italian, the non-default prenominal position isolates this descriptive reading, providing a favorable environment for diagnostics. This leads to the claim that the resulting inference is a conventional implicature, requiring a specific treatment in compositional semantics. Our investigation provides a constrained but solid basis for future work: it establishes a set of diagnostics for a refined meaning typology and demonstrates their effectiveness on a previously underexplored class of data. In addition, it offers a compositional derivation of the phenomenon. Through these three achievements, we aim to contribute to the broader debate on variation in adjectival meaning.