Adjectives, communities, and taxonomies of evaluative meaning

The Chameleon-like Nature of Evaluative Adjectives

This is is an experimental study of the semantics of the construction NP was (not) Adj to VP where Adj is an evaluative adjective such as stupid. We show that in the simple past tense this construction is predominantly ������� for most people but ����������� for some. We also demonstrate that the interpretations are sensitive to preconceptions about how suitable the adjective is as a characteri...

Meaning and Context in Gradable Adjectives i Meaning and Context in Children’s Understanding of Gradable Adjectives

This work provides the first experimental evidence that adults and children as young as three years of age distinguish between three types of gradable adjective meanings – relative, absolute maximum standard, and absolute minimum standard – based on the role of the context in setting the standard of comparison. These results lend support to a typology of gradable adjectives determined by abstra...

The non-evaluative circumplex of personality adjectives.

In judgments about personality, descriptive and evaluative aspects are ordinarily combined; separating them can be important both theoretically and practically. Study 1 showed that two similar descriptive factors can be found in analyses of personality terms, selected independently in English and in German and using different methods to control for evaluation. The factors relate to two pairs of...

Evaluative Adjectives: An Adjunct Control Analysis

Evaluative adjectives like stupid, smart, silly, and rude have been recognized as a coherent syntactic and semantic class for over forty years (Lees 1960, Bolinger 1961, Vendler 1963, 1968, Quirk et al. 1985). The class has gained recent attention, however, from syntacticians looking to extend analyses of argument alignment in the verbal domain to the adjectival domain (Stowell 1991, Bennis 200...

Evaluative Meaning and Cohesion: The Structuring Function of Evaluative Meaning in Scientific Writing