I was listening to NPR as I drove to New Brunswick the other day (I know, so typical!) and I heard about Eliot Spitzer’s plans for his inaguration. The ceremony is scheduled to take place at noon on January 1, after a more official midnight swearing-in. The event is open to the public, but it will be held behind the state capitol, which is to say, outdoors. Governor-elect Spitzer wryly noted that the Old Farmer’s Almanac predicts that the temperature will be “nearly negative 15” on that day.
I started thinking about the ambiguity of that phrase, how nearly with positive numbers seems to scope downward: “nearly five” could be four, but not six. So does “nearly negative 15” also scope downward? Or does the inclusion of a negative invert the scope direction? If it’s -14 degrees, is it “nearly negative 15”? Putting aside for the moment the question of whether nearly patterns like most in that, say, five entails nearly five, it appears that pragmatics forces an interpretation of scopal direction away from some “normal” (gleaned from world knowledge) so that the negative number isn’t in play so much as the direction of the divergence from what’s expected. On August 15th I could say “it was freezing today — it was nearly 50 degrees!” and that would be felicitous if the high that day was 53.
Returning to the question mentioned above, I am of the opinion that our intuitions on this come from a pragmatic rather than semantic place, although I can’t imagine that anything I could say on the topic of near would ever top what the kid in the green and white striped shirt says in this clip:
[QUICKTIME http://www.tractorfeed.com/strictlyspeaking/sounds/near.mov 320 257 false true]
“It isn’t even near it — it’s touching the box!”
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