Are color adjectives (“red”, “green”, etc.) relative adjectives or absolute
adjectives? Existing theories of the meaning of color adjectives attempt to answer
that question using informal (“armchair”) judgments. The informal judgments of
theorists conflict: it has been proposed that color adjectives are absolute with standards
anchored at the minimum degree on the scale, that they are absolute but have nearmidpoint
standards, and that they are relative. In this paper we report two experiments,
one based on entailment patterns and one based on presupposition accommodation,
that investigate the meaning of scalar adjectives. We find evidence confirming the existence
of subgroups of the population who operate with different standards for color
adjectives. The evidence of interpersonal variation in where standards are located on
the relevant scale and how those standards can be adjusted indicates that the existing
theories of the meaning of color adjectives are at best only partially correct. We also
find evidence that paradigmatic relative adjectives (“tall”, “wide”) behave in ways that
are not predicted by the standard theory of scalar adjectives. We discuss several different
possible explanations for this unexpected behavior. We conclude by discussing
the relevance of our findings for philosophical debates about the nature and extent of
semantically encoded context sensitivity in which color adjectives have played a key
role

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• Color adjectives, standards, and thresholds: an experimental investigation