It is a consequence of both Kennedy and McNally’s (Language 2:345–381, 2005) typology of the scale structures of gradable adjectives and Kennedy’s (Linguist Philos 30(1):1–45, 2007) economy principle that an object is clean just in case its degree of cleanness is maximal. So they jointly predict that the sentence ‘Both towels are clean, but the red one is cleaner than the blue one’ (Rotstein and Winter in Nat Lang Semant 12(3):259–288, 2004) is a contradiction. Surely, one can account for the sentence’s assertability by saying that the first instance of ‘clean’ is used loosely: since ‘clean’ pragmatically conveys the property of being close to maximally clean rather than the property of being maximally clean, the sentence as a whole conveys a consistent proposition. I challenge this semantics–pragmatics package by considering the sentence ‘Mary believes that both towels are clean but that the red one is cleaner than the blue one’. We can certainly use this sentence to attribute a coherent belief to Mary: One of its readings says that she believes that the towels are clean by a contextually salient standard (e.g. the speaker’s); the other says that she believes that the towels are clean by her own standard. I argue that Kennedy’s semantics–pragmatics package can’t deliver those readings, and propose that we drop the economy principle and account for those readings semantically by assigning to the belief sentence two distinct truth conditions. I consider two ways to deliver those truth-conditions. The first one posits world-variables in the sentence’s logical form and analyzes those truth-conditions as resulting from two binding possibilities of those variables. The second one proposes that the threshold function introduced by the phonologically null morpheme pos is shiftable in belief contexts.

中文翻译：

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信仰语境中的“绝对”形容词

它是 Kennedy 和 McNally (Language 2:345–381, 2005) 可分级形容词的尺度结构类型学和 Kennedy (Linguist Philos 30(1):1–45, 2007) 经济原则的结果，即物体是干净的以防万一它的清洁度是最大的。因此，他们共同预测“两条毛巾都干净，但红色的比蓝色的更干净”（Rotstein 和 Winter in Nat Lang Semant 12(3):259–288, 2004）这句话是矛盾的。当然，可以通过说“clean”的第一个实例使用松散来解释句子的可断性：由于“clean”在语用上传达了接近最大清洁的属性而不是最大清洁的属性，因此句子作为整体传达了一致的主张。我通过考虑“玛丽相信两条毛巾都很干净，但红色的比蓝色的更干净”这句话来挑战这个语义-语用学包。我们当然可以用这句话将一个连贯的信念归因于玛丽：其中一个读物说她相信根据上下文显着标准（例如说话者的标准）毛巾是干净的；另一个说，她认为按照她自己的标准，毛巾是干净的。我认为肯尼迪的语义-语用学包不能提供这些解读，并建议我们放弃经济原则并通过将两个不同的真值条件分配给信念句来在语义上解释这些解读。我考虑了两种传递这些真值条件的方法。第一个在句子的逻辑形式中假定世界变量，并分析由这些变量的两种绑定可能性产生的真值条件。第二个提出由音素空语素 pos 引入的阈值函数在信念上下文中是可移动的。