 Gradable Adjectives Paradigm examples of gradable adjectives are ‘tall’, ‘old’, ‘rich’, ‘fast’, ‘smart’, and ‘hot’. They are called ‘gradable’ because they can be felicitously modified with adverbs such as ‘fairly’ and ‘very’. Suppose that Susan is both a professional philosopher and a professional basketball player. A speaker who utters ‘Susan is tall’ might use ‘tall’ to mean (very roughly) tall for a philosopher. That same speaker, on another occasion, might utter ‘Susan is not tall’ and use ‘not tall’ to mean (roughly) not tall for a basketball player. Some theorists explain the variability by holding that gradable adjectives are context-sensitive. See Kennedy 2007.