Modification at the interfaces: An introduction

• Modification is, to this day, a poorly understood phenomenon.
• The papers in this SI make novel contributions to the discussion on what modification is.
• They are also relevant to ongoing debates at the syntax–semantics and language–cognition interfaces.

While we can name examples of modifiers (e.g. adjectives, adverbs, PPs, relative clauses), it is not uncontroversial to what extent “modifier” is a syntactic term and how we should represent modification as part of a semantic model. This being true, modification is not only interesting because it challenges a simple composition system that proceeds through application of functions to arguments. In this introduction we present four papers that show that research on modification proves to be relevant for current investigations on the syntax–semantics interface as well as the language–cognition interface.