Decomposition and Processing of Negative Adjectival Comparatives

Abstract

Recent proposals in the semantics literature hold that the negative comparative less and negative adjectives like short in English are morphosyntactically complex, unlike their positive counterparts more and tall. For instance, the negative adjective short might decompose into little tall (Rullmann, Dissertation, 1995; Heim, Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory, vol. 16, 2006, Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung, vol. 12, 2008; Buring, Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory, vol. 17, 2007). Positing a silent little as part of adjectives like short correctly predicts that they are semantically opposite to tall; we seek evidence for this decomposition in language understanding in English and Polish. Our visual verification tasks compare processing of positive and negative comparatives with taller and shorter against that of less symbolically-rich mathematical statements, \(A > B\), \(B < A\). We find that both language and math statements generally lead to monotonic increases in processing load along with the number of negative symbols (as predicted for language by e.g. Clark and Chase, Cognitive Psychology, 3:472–517, 1972). Our study is the first to examine the processing of the gradable predicates tall and short cross-linguistically, as well as in contrast to extensionally-equivalent, and putatively non-linguistic stimuli (cf. Deschamps et al, Cognition, 143:115–128, 2015 with quantificational determiners).