ABSTRACT
In ordinary language use, words like small and large or short and tall are under-stood to have different meanings, depending on the object being described.For example, listeners would not be surprised to learn that a large cat fits comfortably in a small car, or that a short man is taller than a tall stack of pancakes. As noted by Kraut and Higgins (1984), how we understand the claim that “Tom is fast . . . depends on whether he is a boy or a horse” (p. 105). Key in these examples is the slippery character of adjectives; the capacity of a single description to be understood in myriad ways depending on the context or referent at hand.
