Abstract: This chapter considers how adjectival and adverbial modification can be handled in a compositional meaning theory. The basic approach in each case is to treat the modifiers as contributing a predicate to the satisfaction conditions of the sentence in which they appear. In the case of adverbs, this forces the introduction of a suppressed quantifier over events (or states) into the account of the logical form of most sentences. The chapter considers also how to treat topic dependent adjectives and adverbs that interact with the noun or verb that they modify (as in ‘Beavers are large rodents’ and ‘John drank slowly’).

Keywords: compositional meaning theory, topic dependent adjectives, topic dependent adverbs,