Gradable Adjectives Research Articles

An Argument for a Strong Force Semantics of Believe

Abstract The English verb believe is usually taken to encode universal quantification over possibilities (Hintikka 1969) and thus it is predicted to carry a strong modal force. Faced with the intuition that believe feels weaker than uncontroversially strong modals like sure, Hawthorne et al. (2016) instead propose that believe carries a weak modal force, requiring that the agent’s degree of certainty exceed some vague standard and drawing a parallel to relative gradable adjectives like tall. The current contribution takes to heart the idea that believe is gradable but shows that its scale properties in fact argue against a weak force semantics: the scale of believe is upper-closed and so its default standard must be the scale maximum (Kennedy and McNally 2005; Kennedy 2007). This results in a strong modal force, suggesting that the felt weakness of believe is rooted in its ‘subjective’ modal flavor (cf. Lyons 1977; Kratzer 1981) arising from the fact that believe maps propositions to degrees of credence.

Using syntax and semantics to acquire subjective adjective meanings

ABSTRACT Adjectives like good, nice, pretty, and big are among the most frequent adjectives heard by children in the ambient language, and among the first adjectives produced by children. While these gradable adjectives are ostensibly short and sweet, their abstract semantic representations encode reference to features of the discourse context, including speaker subjectivity, which are surprisingly complex, and which also give rise to specific subclasses. How, then, do children acquire these fine-grained adjectival meanings? In this research, we hypothesize that as with verbs, the linguistic environments in which these adjectives appear provide surface-level distributional cues that narrow the space of meaning. In a proof-of-concept experiment with adults following in the footsteps of the Human Simulation Paradigm, we provide empirical evidence that surface-level linguistic patterns support the acquisition of different subclasses of subjective adjectives. Adults were presented with scripted dialogues featuring novel words in controlled linguistic environments manipulating grammatical subjects, adverbial modifiers, standard phrases, syntactic complements, and evidence of faultless disagreement among speakers. Participants were then asked to guess the word meaning (either incrementally after each ‘frame’ or after multiple frames) and rate their confidence. Results, as measured by the percentage of category-consistent, frame-compliant guesses, paired with an increase in confidence levels, indicate a sensitivity to this surface-level information, thereby highlighting the role of the linguistic environment in supporting the acquisition of adjective meaning.

Gradable adjective interpretation under negation: The role of competition

Gradable adjectives have recently drawn a lot of attention in experimental semantics/pragmatics regarding the different interpretations they trigger depending on scale structure, polarity, extremeness, and presence of negation (e.g., Gotzner et al. 2018b; a; Leffel et al. 2019). The current study investigates the interpretation of relative and absolute gradable adjectives in the scope of negation (e.g., not large and not clean, respectively) capitalizing on the role of competition between alternative expressions in adjective interpretation. Our experimental results show that contextual competition between adjective expressions affects the interpretative asymmetry characteristic of positive and negative relative adjectives in the scope of negation (not large vs. not small; see Horn 1989). However, we do not find evidence that contextual competition affects the symmetric interpretation patterns of positive (not clean) and negative absolute adjectives (not dirty) under negation, or that potential relative-like interpretations of negated absolute adjectives hinge on the availability of overt contextual competition. The attested polarity asymmetry of negated relative adjectives is captured by Horn’s pragmatic theory. The apparent availability of relative-like interpretations of negated absolute adjectives are hypothesized to result from a reasoning akin to Horn’s division of pragmatic labor.

Children and adults privilege linguistic over visual information when creating comparison classes for prenominal gradable adjectives

Mastering the semantics of gradable adjectives is a complex acquisition task, since their interpretation requires the calculation of a threshold relative to a comparison class. Context plays a role in determining the comparison class in multiple ways; empirical research has focused on non-linguistic cues, such as world knowledge and visual context, and less on linguistic cues, such as the modified head noun. The present study is the first to examine how preschoolers and adults use the taxonomic category encoded by the modified head noun as well as visual cues to interpret relative (big, small) and absolute (clean, dirty) gradable adjectives. Using existing objects from different taxonomic categories (basic-level and superordinate-level), we developed a picture-choice task that allowed us to infer the comparison class and the threshold from participants’ choices. Forty-three children (aged 3 to 5) and 26 adults, all monolingual German-speaking, were tested. Confirming previous research, children, like adults, showed a context-sensitive interpretation of relative but not of absolute gradable adjectives. The taxonomic label was preferred to visual cues in creating the comparison class already by age three; this advantage of linguistic over non-linguistic information was also present in the adults. We explain this finding with the privileged role of information provided by the taxonomic label: the modified head noun encodes the cognitive representation of an object category and the corresponding taxonomic hierarchy. Accordingly, this representation is easily accessible while creating the comparison class, which provides further evidence that language is a powerful tool to modulate our mental computations.

<i>Not very easy</i>: Towards the unification of scalar implicature and understatement

Modified and unmodified gradable adjectives give rise to two distinct and opposing varieties of pragmatic enrichment: scalar implicature and understatement. While earlier work in pragmatics took these to be complementary inferences derived from opposing conversational principles, more recent work in the formal tradition has placed the focus firmly on scalar implicature and related phenomena, with no attempt to also account for understatement. In this paper I argue that there are good reasons to pursue a unified treatment of the two, and outline one possible way of doing so, framed within the commitment approach to assertion, where I take the commitments that come with asserting a proposition to encompass not only liability for its truth but also acceptance of the social consequences of expressing it. I further discuss how this approach can shed light on recent experimental findings regarding the role of lexical semantics in the pragmatic inferences available to gradable adjectives, as well as a puzzle that these findings pose.

Flexibility in conceptual combinations: A neural network model of gradable adjective modification.

Our ability to combine simple constituents into more complex conceptual combinations is a fundamental aspect of cognition. Gradable adjectives (e.g., 'tall' and 'light') are a critical example of this process, as their meanings vary depending on the noun with which they are combined. For example, a dark diamond is less dark than dark charcoal. Here, we investigate how a neural network encodes the flexible nature of gradable adjectives in adjective-noun pairs, using the perceptual feature of brightness as a test case. We trained a neural network to predict human brightness ratings for unmodified nouns and adjective-noun pairs and assessed its ability to generalize to untrained combinations (e.g., 'light paint' vs. 'dark paint'). We also explored how this information is encoded. We found that flexible learning of gradable adjectives was possible, with neural networks first making predictions based on the adjective alone, and then modulating these with information from the noun later in learning. We also found that model outputs mimicked the kind of non-additive feature modulation present in human data. Our results have implications for understanding how semantic composition occurs and generate testable predictions for future work.

Absolute gradable adjectives and loose talk

Kennedy (Linguist Philos 30:1–45, 2007) forcefully proposes what is now a widely assumed semantics for absolute gradable adjectives. On this semantics, maximum standard adjectives like “straight” and “dry” ascribe a maximal degree of the underlying quantity. Meanwhile, minimum standard adjectives like “bent” and “wet” merely ascribe a non-zero, non-minimal degree of the underlying quantity. This theory clashes with the ordinary intuition that sentences like “The stick is straight” are frequently true while sentences like “The stick is bent” are frequently informative, and fans of the indicated theory of absolute gradable adjectives appeal to loose talk in response. One goal of this paper is to show that all extant theories of loose talk are inconsistent with this response strategy. Another goal is to offer a revised version of Hoek’s (Philos Rev 127:151–196, 2018, in: Proceedings of the 22nd Amsterdam Colloquium, 2019) recent theory of loose talk that accommodates absolute gradable adjectives after all, while being defensible against a range of important concerns.

ɬwa:n⁵ as a Marker of the Degree of Expressiveness in the Kam Language

This paper presents an analysis of syntactic collocations that include the constraints on an adjective phrase (AP) and adverbs or final particles (X) in the ɬwa:n⁵ + AP + X construction, as well as its pragmatic features and grammatical functions in the Kam language. ɬwa:n⁵ functions as an exclamative marker (EM) that conveys the expressive meaning of the speaker’s attitude. The primary lexical meaning of ɬwa:n⁵ is ‘to calculate’ or ‘to regard as’, and the word is borrowed from Chinese (算 suàn, ‘to count’, ‘to calculate’, ‘to regard as’). The role of ɬwa:n⁵ in the construction ɬwa:n⁵ + AP + X will mainly be discussed in this paper. In addition, the adjectives that can collocate with ɬwa:n⁵ are subject to a gradeability restriction, that is, only gradable adjectives can collocate with ɬwa:n⁵. In general, the ɬwa:n⁵ construction is used to express that the speaker expected an existing situation with a gradable property; in reality, the degree follows a particular scalar and surpasses the expectation.

Algumas notas sobre a quantificação de Degree Achievements em Português Europeu

The present investigation addresses the quantification of Degree Achievements (DAs) in European Portuguese (EP). DAs have been extensively investigated, as they are mostly deadjectival verbs, which therefore inherit their structure from gradable adjectives. These verbs have the special feature of allowing ambiguous readings regarding the telicity of the event projected by the verb: either telic or atelic. Since they derive from gradable adjectives, DAs have typically been considered, in the literature, gradable predicates, which allows us to question whether or not this type of verb can be quantified. Thus, the present work intends to verify the compatibility of this type of verbs with the EP quantifiers muito (‘very’) and pouco (‘little’). Taking into consideration the research by Quadros Gomes (2011a, 2011b) on the modification of gradable adjectives by muito (‘much/very’) and bem (‘well’) in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), we aim to understand how these quantifiers will act on DAs particularly in what concerns their basic scalar structure (open-scale and closed-scale DAs) and the final readings available for each case: telic, atelic or both. The results show that the type of scale does not influence the final reading, since none of the analysed DAs induces a telic reading (i.e., the attaining of a maximum degree, contextually defined). In fact, in all the cases, even with closed-scale DAs, the final interpretation is atelic, denoting a process reading. Moreover, in EP, a second reading, concerning the degree of frequency of the eventualities denoted by these verbs (which denotes repetition of the events), seems to be available for most of the analysed examples.

Identifying Adjective Phrases and Gradable Structure in Newspaper” The Jakarta Post”

The adjective that can be modified by degree words or degree adverbs is gradable adjectives. Gradable can also happen to adjectives participial, but not all of them. The adjective phrase has three main functions: attributive adjectives (modified before or after nouns), subject complement (complement subject NPs), and object complement (complement of the object of a clause. This paper focuses on identifying adjective phrase structure and its functions, exploring the categories which are modified, and determining the gradable within the adjective phrase. This paper aims to discover phrases, identify the adjective phrase, and analyze it in the tree diagram. It applied qualitative descriptive method to analyze, and documentation technique to collect the data. The data were obtained from the newspaper of ‘The Jakarta Post’ Vol. 37 No. 086 on Saturday, August 10th, 2019. The result found that pre-modifier (degree words and degree adverbs) + Adjective is the most frequent gradable adjective occurred in the texts, and then it is followed by an adjective (head), double adjectives, and pre-modifier (determiners) + adjectives.

The scope of epistemic focal bias: response to Blome-Tillmann

ABSTRACT In this response to Michael Blome-Tillmann's comments on On Folk Epistemology, I defend the book's epistemic focal bias account of the salient alternatives effect that Blome-Tillmann takes to motivate epistemic contextualism. First, I defend the epistemic focal bias account against Blome-Tillmann's criticism that it is insufficiently general insofar as it fails to account for a range of cases. Second, I defend the epistemic focal bias account from Blome-Tillmann's charge that it overgeneralizes insofar as it can ‘explain away the context-sensitivity of gradable adjectives.’ Along the way, I discuss the metaphilosophical principles that guide the epistemic focal bias account.

The anatomy of Chinese Superlative Modifiers

Abstract This paper studies the morpho-semantics of a particular class of scalar focus adverbs called Superlative Modifiers (SMs). One key feature of these scalar focus adverbs is that they bear degree morphology, along with gradable adjectives involved. Most analyses of SMs in the market do not take into consideration the semantic contributions of their morphology. However, the cross-linguistic facts strongly suggest that the morphological makeup of SMs cannot simply be a linguistic coincidence. Thus, SMs have posed a long-standing and intriguing morpho-semantic puzzle: Why do SMs morphologically involve a quantity adjective (Q-adjective) and the superlative morpheme? What is the role of Q-adjectives and the superlative morpheme inside SMs? How are these morphological pieces of SMs connected with their semantics? This paper is dedicated to these questions by focusing on two expressions of Mandarin SMs, zui-duo and zui-shao (which morphologically consist of only the superlative morpheme zui and a quantity adjective duo ‘many/much’ or shao ‘few/little’), and presents a decompositional analysis of both expressions as modified superlatives. If the proposed analysis is on the right track, it shows that insights and tools developed in studies on gradability (Kennedy 1999) can be applied to those on scalarity. Recently, Greenberg (2016; 2017) has argued for a gradability-based semantics of English even. This paper contributes to this growing research agenda, through a detailed case study of SMs, a class of scalar focus adverbs but bearing degree morphology and gradable adjectives. Moreover, this paper also deepens our understanding of the semantics of Q-adjectives. By studying SMs, this paper shows that the measured domain of Q-adjectives need not be structured by the part-of relation, but rather the natural ordering on the relevant domain. Crucially, this updated view on Wellwood’s (2014; 2015) semantics of Q-adjectives leads us to their differential uses and ultimately a unified account of Q-adjectives.

Semantic Adaptation to the Interpretation of Gradable Adjectives via Active Linguistic Interaction.

When communicating, people adapt their linguistic representations to those of their interlocutors. Previous studies have shown that this also occurs at the semantic level for vague and context-dependent terms such as quantifiers and uncertainty expressions. However, work to date has mostly focused on passive exposure to a given speaker's interpretation, without considering the possible role of active linguistic interaction. In this study, we focus on gradable adjectives big and small and develop a novel experimental paradigm that allows participants to ask clarification questions to figureout their interlocutor's interpretation. We find that, when in doubt, speakers do resort to this strategy, despite its inherent cognitive cost, and that doing so results in higher semantic alignment measured in terms of communicative success. While not all question-answer pairs are equally informative, we show that speakers become better questioners as the interaction progresses. Yet, the higher semantic alignment observed when speakers are able to ask questions does not increase over time. This suggests that conversational interaction's key advantage may be to boost coordination without committing to long-term semantic updates. Our findings shed new light on the mechanisms used by speakers to achieve semantic alignment and on how language is shaped bycommunication.

Incremental pragmatic interpretation of gradable adjectives: The role of standards of comparison

While for relative gradable adjectives the value on the underlying measurement scale that serves as a standard of comparison is contextually determined, for absolute gradable adjectives this is typically taken to be a fixed, context-invariant value (Rotstein & Winter 2004; Kennedy & McNally 2005). The present study investigates how lexical-semantic factors, such as the type of standard of comparison invoked by gradable adjectives, affect the incremental computation of scalar implicatures triggered by such adjectives. Our study shows that the incremental computation of scalar implicatures is facilitated by the immediate visual context but only for relative adjectives. Minimum standard absolute adjectives, which impose a lower bound on their corresponding measurement scales, robustly trigger upper-bounded interpretations independently of the availability of contrastive visual information. Our findings indicate that different kinds of scalar meaning are computed incrementally and potentially in parallel. Overall, these findings shed new light on theories of scalar implicatures and highlight the need for a model of adjective meaning that incorporates semantic and pragmatic factors (see also Gotzner 2021; and for related ideas in the domain of quantifiers see Franke & Bergen 2020 and Cremers, Wilcox & Spector 2022, and Magri (2017) for Hirschberg scales).

Comparatives in Context

Abstract In “Unarticulated Comparison Classes” 2018 [2009], Richard Vallée adopts John Perry’s (2012 [2001]) reflexive-referential theory of meaning and content as well as his concept of unarticulated constituents (Perry 1986) to deal with certain context-sensitive elements of the truth-conditions of statements containing relative gradable predicates. I am sympathetic both with the general framework and with the assumption that unarticulated constituents are involved in the truth-conditions of bare positives such as “Monica is tall.” I do not share, however, Vallée’s main conclusions on the examples he provides as pre-theoretical evidence. This leads me to disagree with some details of his proposal for the semantics and pragmatics of relative gradable adjectives.

Pragmatic reasoning and semantic convention: A case study on gradable adjectives

Gradable adjectives denote properties that are relativized to contextual thresholds of application: how long an object must be in order to count as long in a context of utterance depends on what the threshold is in that context. But thresholds are variable across contexts and adjectives, and are in general uncertain. This leads to two questions about the meanings of gradable adjectives in particular contexts of utterance: what truth conditions are they understood to introduce, and what information are they taken to communicate? In this paper, we consider two kinds of answers to these questions, one from semantic theory, and one from Bayesian pragmatics, and assess them relative to human judgments about truth and communicated information. Our findings indicate that Bayesian accounts can model human judgments about what is communicated better than they can model human judgments about truth conditions, and their weakness on the latter is mainly because they fall short in accurately predicting the relevant threshold distributions. We explore the possibility that the overall performance of the Bayesian accounts can be potentially improved when they are supplemented with the threshold conventions postulated by semantic theory. EARLY ACCESS

Relative gradable adjective recursion such as <em>small small big mushrooms</em> is more challenging for children than possessive recursion such as <em>the deer’s friend’s sister’s mushrooms</em>

Our experiment investigates whether children handle recursive possessives (R-Poss) in a more adult-like manner than recursive relative gradable adjectives (R-RGA). While the abstract notion of indirect recursion underlies both categories, we ask whether individual syntactic-semantic properties determine different acquisition paths in English for R-Poss and R-RGA at the 2-Level (the deer’s friend’s mushrooms, small big mushrooms) and at the 3-Level (the deer’s friend’s sister’s mushrooms, small small big mushrooms). The results indicate that older children perform better than younger children on 2- and 3-Level R-Poss. However, this trend is not observed for R-RGA where both age groups perform similarly, successfully handling 2- but not 3-Level R-RGA. Analysis of individual results reveal that children who are successful with comprehension and production at 3-Level R-RGA are also successful with 3-Level R-Poss, but not the other way around. We conclude that 3-Level R-RGA is more challenging than 3-Level R-Poss, arguing that this difficulty arises from R-RGA syntax-semantics which involves a set-subset relation and gradability relative to comparative scales.

Warm (for Winter): Inferring Comparison Classes in Communication.

The meanings of natural language utterances depend heavily on context. Yet, what counts as context is often only implicit in conversation. The utterance it's warm outside signals that the temperature outside is relatively high, but the temperature could be high relative to a number of different comparison classes: other days of the year, other weeks, other seasons, etc. Theories of context sensitivity in language agree that the comparison class is a crucial variable for understanding meaning, but little is known about how a listener decides upon the comparison class. Using the case study of gradable adjectives (e.g., warm), we extend a Bayesian model of pragmatic inference to reason flexibly about the comparison class and test its qualitative predictions in a large‐scale free‐production experiment. We find that human listeners infer the comparison class by reasoning about the kinds of observations that would be remarkable enough for a speaker to mention, given the speaker and listener's shared knowledge of the world. Further, we quantitatively synthesize the model and data using Bayesian data analysis, which reveals that usage frequency and a preference for basic‐level categories are two main factors in comparison class inference. This work presents new data and reveals the mechanisms by which human listeners recover the relevant aspects of context when understanding language.

Scalar diversity and ignorance inferences: An experimental study on 'at least' as a modifier of numerals vs. adjectives

This work presents results from an experiment that investigates whether at least as a modifier of gradable adjectives (e.g., at least misleading) triggers speaker ignorance inferences just as has been established for at least as a numeral modifier (e.g., at least two). I find that, while at least gives rise to ignorance inferences with both types of scalar expressions, this happens in varying degrees, contra existing accounts of at least (Geurts & Nouwen 2007; Cohen & Krifka 2014) and in line with experimental evidence on the scalar inferences of unmodified adjectives and numerals (Doran, Baker, McNabb, Larson & Ward 2009), known as scalar diversity. I also find indications that the scale structure of adjectives may affect the availability of ignorance inferences, as in the case of scalar implicature computation for unmodified adjectives (Gotzner, Solt & Benz 2018a), yet in a reverse manner.

Algumas notas sobre a quantificação de adjetivos de cor por muito e pouco

The present investigation aimed to assess whether color adjectives, considering that they are qualificatives, could accept graduation and, if so, what type of scale they would be associated with. The paper begins by focusing on some of the existing literature on gradable adjectives, presenting, afterwards, some works specifically focused on color adjectives. The quantification of color adjectives was analyzed through the combination of the selected adjectives (primary colors: yellow, blue and red plus black and white) with the quantifiers muito and pouco. The results show that, in EP, the semantic investigation of this type of adjective is complex, since the readings obtained were not linear. In fact, there is, on the one hand, a typically gradable reading, which promotes a movement of the adjectives to a higher or lower point of the scale. It is possible, on the other hand, to obtain metaphorical readings, whose non-literal uses can have diverse meanings, which can either refer to physical or emotional states, skin tones, or even meanings that are very specific for EP, such as, for example, to make ayellow smile. It is thus difficult to evaluate the type of scale associated with these adjectives, since, in the case of intensity readings, there may indeed be an approximation to a representative prototype of the color, but the same does not apply to metaphorical readings