Scalar Adjectives Research Articles

"Not" in the brain and behavior.

Negation is key for cognition but has no physical basis, raising questions about its neural origins. A new study in PLOS Biology on the negation of scalar adjectives shows that negation acts in part by altering the response to the adjective it negates.

Negation mitigates rather than inverts the neural representations of adjectives.

Combinatoric linguistic operations underpin human language processes, but how meaning is composed and refined in the mind of the reader is not well understood. We address this puzzle by exploiting the ubiquitous function of negation. We track the online effects of negation ("not") and intensifiers ("really") on the representation of scalar adjectives (e.g., "good") in parametrically designed behavioral and neurophysiological (MEG) experiments. The behavioral data show that participants first interpret negated adjectives as affirmative and later modify their interpretation towards, but never exactly as, the opposite meaning. Decoding analyses of neural activity further reveal significant above chance decoding accuracy for negated adjectives within 600 ms from adjective onset, suggesting that negation does not invert the representation of adjectives (i.e., "not bad" represented as "good"); furthermore, decoding accuracy for negated adjectives is found to be significantly lower than that for affirmative adjectives. Overall, these results suggest that negation mitigates rather than inverts the neural representations of adjectives. This putative suppression mechanism of negation is supported by increased synchronization of beta-band neural activity in sensorimotor areas. The analysis of negation provides a steppingstone to understand how the human brain represents changes of meaning over time.

Spontaneous perspective-taking in real-time language comprehension: evidence from eye-movements and grain of coordination

Linguistic communication requires interlocutors to consider differences in each other’s knowledge (perspective-taking). However, perspective-taking might either be spontaneous or strategic. We monitored listeners’ eye movements in a referential communication task. A virtual speaker gave temporally ambiguous instructions with scalar adjectives (“big” in “big cubic block”). Scalar adjectives assume a contrasting object (a small cubic block). We manipulated whether the contrasting object (a small triangle) for a competitor object (a big triangle) was in common ground (visible to both speaker and listener) or was occluded so it was in the listener’s privileged ground, in which case perspective-taking would allow earlier reference-resolution. We used a complex visual context with multiple objects, making strategic perspective-taking unlikely when all objects are in the listener’s referential domain. A turn-taking, puzzle-solving task manipulated whether participants could anticipate a more restricted referential domain. Pieces were either confined to a small area (requiring fine-grained coordination) or distributed across spatially distinct regions (requiring only coarse-grained coordination). Results strongly supported spontaneous perspective-taking: Although comprehension was less time-locked in the coarse-grained condition, participants in both conditions used perspective information to identify the target referent earlier when the competitor contrast was in privileged ground, even when participants believed instructions were computer-generated.

Adjective position and referential efficiency in American Sign Language: Effects of adjective semantics, sign type and age of sign exposure

Previous research has pointed at communicative efficiency as a possible constraint on language structure. Here we investigated adjective position in American Sign Language (ASL), a language with relatively flexible word order, to test the incremental efficiency hypothesis, according to which both speakers and signers try to produce efficient referential expressions that are sensitive to the word order of their languages. The results of three experiments using a standard referential communication task confirmed that deaf ASL signers tend to produce absolute adjectives, such as color or material, in prenominal position, while scalar adjectives tend to be produced in prenominal position when expressed as lexical signs, but in postnominal position when expressed as classifiers. Age of ASL exposure also had an effect on referential choice, with early-exposed signers producing more classifiers than late-exposed signers, in some cases. Overall, our results suggest that linguistic, pragmatic and developmental factors affect referential choice in ASL, supporting the hypothesis that communicative efficiency is an important factor in shaping language structure and use.

Processing symbolic magnitude information conveyed by number words and by scalar adjectives.

Humans not only process and compare magnitude information such as size, duration, and number perceptually, but they also communicate about these properties using language. In this respect, a relevant class of lexical items are so-called scalar adjectives like “big,” “long,” “loud,” and so on which refer to magnitude information. It has been proposed that humans use an amodal and abstract representation format shared by different dimensions, called the generalised magnitude system (GMS). In this paper, we test the hypothesis that scalar adjectives are symbolic references to GMS representations, and, therefore, GMS gets involved in processing their meaning. Previously, a parallel hypothesis on the relation between number symbols and GMS representations has been tested with the size congruity paradigm. The results of these experiments showed interference between the processing of number symbols and the processing of physical (font-) size. In the first three experiments of the present study (total N = 150), we used the size congruity paradigm and the same/different task to look at the potential interaction between physical size magnitude and numerical magnitude expressed by number words. In the subsequent three experiments (total N = 149), we looked at a parallel potential interaction between physical size magnitude and scalar adjective meaning. In the size congruity paradigm, we observed interference between the processing of the numerical value of number words and the meaning of scalar adjectives, on the one hand, and physical (font-) size, on the other hand, when participants had to judge the number words or the adjectives (while ignoring physical size). No interference was obtained for the reverse situation, i.e., when participants judged the physical font size (while ignoring numerical value or meaning). The results of the same/different task for both number words and scalar adjectives strongly suggested that the interference that was observed in the size congruity paradigm was likely due to a response conflict at the decision stage of processing rather than due to the recruitment of GMS representations. Taken together, it can be concluded that the size congruity paradigm does not provide evidence in support the hypothesis that GMS representations are used in the processing of number words or scalar adjectives. Nonetheless, the hypothesis we put forward about scalar adjectives is still is a promising potential line of research. We make a number of suggestions for how this hypothesis can be explored in future studies.

Online pragmatic interpretations of scalar adjectives are affected by perceived speaker reliability.

Linguistic communication requires understanding of words in relation to their context. Among various aspects of context, one that has received relatively little attention until recently is the speakers themselves. We asked whether comprehenders' online language comprehension is affected by the perceived reliability with which a speaker formulates pragmatically well-formed utterances. In two eye-tracking experiments, we conceptually replicated and extended a seminal work by Grodner and Sedivy (2011). A between-participant manipulation was used to control reliability with which a speaker follows implicit pragmatic conventions (e.g., using a scalar adjective in accordance with contextual contrast). Experiment 1 replicated Grodner and Sedivy's finding that contrastive inference in response to scalar adjectives was suspended when both the spoken input and the instructions provided evidence of the speaker's (un)reliability: For speech from the reliable speaker, comprehenders exhibited the early fixations attributable to a contextually-situated, contrastive interpretation of a scalar adjective. In contrast, for speech from the unreliable speaker, comprehenders did not exhibit such early fixations. Experiment 2 provided novel evidence of the reliability effect in the absence of explicit instructions. In both experiments, the effects emerged in the earliest expected time window given the stimuli sentence structure. The results suggest that real-time interpretations of spoken language are optimized in the context of a speaker identity, characteristics of which are extrapolated across utterances.

PAROT: Translating natural language to SPARQL

This paper provides a dependency based framework for converting natural language to SPARQL. We present a tool known as PAROT (which echos answers from ontologies) which is able to handle user’s queries that contain compound sentences, negation, scalar adjectives and numbered list. PAROT employs a number of dependency based heuristics to convert user’s queries to user’s triples. The user’s triples are then processed by the lexicon into ontology triples. It is these ontology triples that are used to construct SPARQL queries. From the experiments conducted, PAROT provides state of the art results.

A semantic account of partial reduplication in Turkish

This study analyzes the factors governing the scope of partial reduplication in Turkish, with particular emphasis on why certain forms are unattested. We propose that whether a given adjective participates in partial reduplication can be determined based on its semantic class: scalar adjectives can, non-scalars cannot. We further demonstrate that, among scalar adjectives, partial reduplication is also sensitive to maximal/non-maximal contrast; the former yields “completely” semantics while the latter yields “very” semantics. The model we propose captures both the class of adjectives that can undergo partial reduplication as well as the resulting interpretation when they do so. As such, our proposal contrasts with earlier ones in providing principled reasons for the class of partially reduplicated adjectives.

PAROT: Translating natural language to SPARQL

This paper provides a dependency based framework for converting natural language to SPARQL. We present a tool known as PAROT (which echos answers from ontologies) which is able to handle user’s queries that contain compound sentences, negation, scalar adjectives and numbered list. PAROT employs a number of dependency based heuristics to convert user’s queries to user’s triples. The user’s triples are then processed by the lexicon into ontology triples. It is these ontology triples that are used to construct SPARQL queries. From the experiments conducted, PAROT provides state of the art results.

Developmental Changes in the Utilization of Referential Visual Context during Sentence Comprehension: Eye Movement and Pupil Dilation Evidence from Children and Adults

ABSTRACTThis study investigated age differences in the utilization of visually contrastive information (i.e., differently colored identical objects) for temporary referential ambiguity resolution during spoken sentence comprehension. Five- and 6-year-old Japanese children and adults listened to sentences that contained a color adjective-noun combination and identified the object that the noun phrase referred to from a visual scene. We examined the effects of visually contrastive information on either fixations on referent/competitor objects or pupil dilations. The results showed that participants of all age groups directed fewer gazes toward the referent object after they heard the adjectives, when the visually contrastive object was the competitor (i.e., not the referent). The 5-year-olds also directed fewer gazes toward the referent when the contrastive object was the referent. With regard to pupil dilations, no significant effects emerged among adults; however, the pupil dilations of 6-year-olds were larger when the displays contained visually contrastive information than when they did not. The pupil dilations of 5-year-olds were smaller when the referent was one of the contrastive objects. These results suggest that young children’s utilization of visually contrastive information is not fully mature and that it may begin with scalar adjectives and eventually generalize to non-scalar adjectives.

Information Integration in Modulation of Pragmatic Inferences During Online Language Comprehension

Upon hearing a scalar adjective in a definite referring expression such as "the big…," listeners typically make anticipatory eye movements to an item in a contrast set, such as a big glass in the context of a smaller glass. Recent studies have suggested that this rapid, contrastive interpretation of scalar adjectives is malleable and calibrated to the speaker's pragmatic competence. In a series of eye-tracking experiments, we explore the nature of the evidence necessary for the modulation of pragmatic inferences in language comprehension, focusing on the complementary roles of top-down information-(knowledge about the particular speaker's pragmatic competence)and bottom-up cues(distributional information about the use of scalar adjectives in the environment). We find that bottom-up evidence alone (e.g., the speaker says "the big dog" in a context with one dog), in large quantities, can be sufficient to trigger modulation of the listener's contrastive inferences, with or without top-down cues to support this adaptation. Further, these findings suggest that listeners track and flexibly combine multiple sources of information in service of efficient pragmatic communication.

Korean Mothers Attune the Frequency and Acoustic Saliency of Sound Symbolic Words to the Linguistic Maturity of Their Children.

The present study investigates Korean mothers’ use of sound symbolism, in particular expressive lengthening and ideophones, in their speech directed to their children. Specifically, we explore whether the frequency and acoustic saliency of sound symbolic words are modulated by the maturity of children’s linguistic ability. A total of 36 infant-mother dyads, 12 each belonging to the three groups of preverbal (M = 8-month-old), early speech (M = 13-month-old), and multiword (M = 27-month-old) stage, were recorded in a 40-min free-play session. The results were consistent with the findings in previous research that the ratio of sound symbolic words in mothers’ speech decreases with child age and that they are acoustically more salient than conventional words in duration and pitch measures. We additionally found that mothers weaken the prominence for ideophones for older children in mean pitch, suggesting that such prominence of these iconic words might bootstrap infants’ word learning especially when they are younger. Interestingly, however, we found that mothers maintain the acoustic saliency of expressive lengthening consistently across children’s ages in all acoustic measures. There is some indication that children at age 2 are not likely to have mastered the fine details of scalar properties in certain words. Thus, it could be that they still benefit from the enhanced prosody of expressive lengthening in learning the semantic attributes of scalar adjectives, and, accordingly, mothers continue to provide redundant acoustic cues longer for expressive lengthening than ideophones.

Implicature Clash and Its Resolution : The Scalar Adjective chakhata

The adjective chakhata has developed new meanings over the past two decades and Lim (2014) claims that its various meanings are metaphorically extended from the original meaning. While doing so, he observes that chakhata sometimes indicates 'excellent' and sometimes 'not excellent.' He categorizes these meanings as metaphorically extended denotations, just like all the other meanings he observes. However, Joh and Choi (2017) claim that 'excellent' and 'not excellent' are implicatures rather than denotations, demonstrating that the two meanings are cancellable, unlike denotations which are known to resist cancellation. When the implicature-based account is supported by cancellability, a question arises as to how the two opposing implicatures are resolved when they clash. Data observation reveals that the R-implicature, ‘excellent,’ has a priority over the Q-implicature, ‘not excellent,’ in the case of the scalar adjective chakhata, unlike the claim that is made by Atlas and Levinson (1981). Even though more scalar adjectives have yet to be examined, the paper challenges the claim that Q-implicatures have priority over R-implicatures in case of implicature clash.

Color adjectives, standards, and thresholds: an experimental investigation

Are color adjectives (“red”, “green”, etc.) relative adjectives or absolute adjectives? Existing theories of the meaning of color adjectives attempt to answer that question using informal (“armchair”) judgments. The informal judgments of theorists conflict: it has been proposed that color adjectives are absolute with standards anchored at the minimum degree on the scale, that they are absolute but have near-midpoint standards, and that they are relative. In this paper we report two experiments, one based on entailment patterns and one based on presupposition accommodation, that investigate the meaning of scalar adjectives. We find evidence confirming the existence of subgroups of the population who operate with different standards for color adjectives. The evidence of interpersonal variation in where standards are located on the relevant scale and how those standards can be adjusted indicates that the existing theories of the meaning of color adjectives are at best only partially correct. We also find evidence that paradigmatic relative adjectives (“tall”, “wide”) behave in ways that are not predicted by the standard theory of scalar adjectives. We discuss several different possible explanations for this unexpected behavior. We conclude by discussing the relevance of our findings for philosophical debates about the nature and extent of semantically encoded context sensitivity in which color adjectives have played a key role.

Scalar adjectives and the temporal unfolding of semantic composition: An MEG investigation

A growing body of research implicates the left anterior temporal lobe (LATL) for combinatorial semantic processing. However, magnetoencephalography (MEG) studies have revealed this activity to be timed quite early, at 200–250ms, preceding the most common time window for lexical-semantic effects. What type of semantic composition could the LATL perform at 200–250ms? We hypothesized that the LATL computes an early stage of composition, taking as its input only the most readily available lexical-semantic information. To test this, we varied the context-sensitivity of prenominal adjectives, postulating that only context-insensitive intersective adjectives (e.g., dead, Italian) should compose in an early time window, whereas the composition of context-sensitive scalar adjectives (e.g., fast, large) should be delayed until the interpretation of the subsequent noun is fully determined. Consistent with this, early combinatory effects in left temporal cortex were observed only for intersective adjectives, though in this study the effects were somewhat more posterior than in prior reports. Overall, our results suggest multiple stages of semantic composition, of which the LATL may index the earliest.

FUNKCIJSKE PROJEKCIJE U SRPSKOM NOMINALNOM KOMPLEKSU

Svrha ovog rada je da pokaže da projekcija DP u srpskom jeziku ne postoji i da pridevski vid ne sudeluje u distinkciji određenost/neodređenost kod imenica. Prvo ispitujemo primenljivost ponuđenih modela DP-a u srpskom jeziku zasnovanih na postojanju i pozicioniranju prisvojnih i pokaznih zamenica kao i „dugog“ naspram „kratkom“ obliku prideva. Budući da se elementi kao što su demonstrativi i posesivi ponašaju kao pridevi (kongruišu sa imenicom, ne zauzimaju mesto morfosintaktičkog lokusa niti inhibiraju ekstrakcije levih grana (Zlatić 1998; Trenkić 2004; Bošković 2005) zaključujemo da projekcija DP, kao takva, ne postoji u srpskom jeziku. Umesto toga, za jedinstvenu funkcijsku projekciju imenske sintagme u srpskom uzimamo padežnu frazu (KP) odnosno frazu slaganja (AgrP), koja, između ostalog, zahteva kongruenciju svih adjunkta unutar imenske fraze. Dalje, ispitujemo distinkciju određenosti/neodređenosti kao svojstva striktno pridevske fraze. Iz komplementarne distribucije intenzifikatora i kratkog, „neodređenog“ oblika prideva zaključujemo da intenzifikatori i dugi oblik prideva imaju određeno zajedničko svojstvo. Ovo svojstvo, uz nemogućnost pozicioniranja intenzifikatora uz komplementar pridev, nalazimo u semantici prideva kao stepen zastupljenosti određene osobine označene skalarnim pridevima. Samim tim, dugi oblik prideva interpretiramo kao način iskazivanja implicitnog poređenja u odnosu na podrazumevanu zastupljenost neke osobine. Na posletku predlažemo frazu stepena (DgrP) kao funkcijsku projekciju prideva.

Evoking Context with Contrastive Stress: Effects on Pragmatic Enrichment.

Although it is widely acknowledged that context influences a variety of pragmatic phenomena, it is not clear how best to articulate this notion of context and thereby explain the nature of its influence. In this paper, we target contextual alternatives that are evoked via focus placement and test how the same contextual manipulation can influence three different phenomena that involve pragmatic enrichment: scalar implicature, presupposition, and coreference. We argue that focus placement influences these three phenomena indirectly by providing the listener with information about the likely question under discussion (QUD) that a particular utterance answers (Roberts, 1996/2012). In three listening experiments, we find that the predicted interpretations are indeed made more available when focus placement is added to the final element (to the scalar adjective, to an entity embedded under the negated presupposition trigger, and to the predicate of a pronoun). These findings bring together several distinct strands of work on the effect of focus placement on interpretation all in the domain of pragmatic enrichment. Together they advance our empirical understanding of the relation between focus placement and QUD and highlight commonalities between implicature, presupposition, and coreference.

Adjectival vagueness in a Bayesian model of interpretation

We derive a probabilistic account of the vagueness and context-sensitivity of scalar adjectives from a Bayesian approach to communication and interpretation. We describe an iterated-reasoning architecture for pragmatic interpretation and illustrate it with a simple scalar implicature example. We then show how to enrich the apparatus to handle pragmatic reasoning about the values of free variables, explore its predictions about the interpretation of scalar adjectives, and show how this model implements Edgington’s (Analysis 2:193–204,1992, Keefe and Smith (eds.) Vagueness: a reader, 1997) account of the sorites paradox, with variations. The Bayesian approach has a number of explanatory virtues: in particular, it does not require any special-purpose machinery for handling vagueness, and it is integrated with a promising new approach to pragmatics and other areas of cognitive science.

The Development of Southern Min Demonstratives + Type Classifier/Quantifier Construction in Late Ming and Early Qing Texts: From Demonstratives to Intensifiers

This paper explores the change in constructions featuring proximal/distal demonstratives + type classifier/quantifier attested in Southern Min playscripts published in the late Ming and early Qing. Hur^2 許/tsi^2只and iunn^7樣form particular constructions that have a range of features in syntax, semantics, phonology, and pragmatics. The sense of type is depleted when fusional words hiunn^3向and tsiunn^3障are formed. The missing sense of type can be refurbished by new type classifiers such as puann^1般, sinn^1生, and ni^5年. The newly emerging hiunn^3 puann^1/sinn^1/ni^5向般/生/年or tsiunn^3 puann^1/sinn^1/ni^5障般/生/年reflects the phenomenon of Jespersen's Cycle. The new function of the fusional words led to the change of determiner + classifier to intensifier as a modifier of scalar adjectives or anaphors with discourse function. Another fusional word, tsuah^4拙, results from the fusion of tsi^2只and ua^7夥, denoting 'many' tsuah^4拙, and takes on the function of intensifier when its quantity sense is depleted. This is also a reflection of Jespersen's Cycle. This paper concludes that the demonstrative + type classifier/quantifier construction exhibits chronological strata and subdialectal variation.

A Delineation solution to the puzzles of absolute adjectives

The paper presents both new data and a new analysis of the semantic and pragmatic properties of the class of absolute scalar adjectives (ex. dry, wet, straight, bent, flat, empty, full...) within an extension of a well-known logical framework for the analysis of gradable predicates: the delineation semantics framework (DelS) (see Klein, Linguist Philos 4:1-45, 1980 ; van Benthem, Pac Philos Q 63:193-203, 1982 ; van Rooij, J Semant 28:335-358, 2011b , among many others). It has been long observed that the context-sensitivity, vagueness and gradability features of absolute scalar predicates give rise to certain puzzles for their analysis within most, if not all, modern formal semantic frameworks. While there exist proposals for solving these puzzles within other major frameworks (such as the degree semantics framework), it has been argued that some of their aspects are particularly challenging for the analysis of absolute scalar predicates within the delineation approach. By combining insights into the relationship between context-sensitivity and scalarity from the DelS framework with insights into the relationship between tolerance/similarity relations and the Sorites paradox from Cobreros et al.'s ( 2012 ) Tolerant, Classical, Strict (TCS) framework, I propose a new logical system, called Delineation TCS (DelTCS), in which to set analyses of four classes of adjectival predicates. I argue that this new framework allows for an analysis of absolute scalar adjectives that answers these challenges for delineation-based frameworks, while still preserving the heart of the Klein-ian approach