Evaluative Adjectives

The problem of value disagreement and contextualist, relativist and metalinguistic attempts of solving it are laid out. Although the metalin-guistic account seems to be on the right track, it is argued that it does not suffi ciently explain why and how disagreements about the meaning of evaluative terms are based on and can be decided by appeal to existing social practices. As a remedy, it is argued that original suggestions from Putnam's " The Meaning of 'Meaning' " ought to be taken seriously. The resulting dual aspect theory of meaning can explain value disagreement in much the same way as it deals with disagreement about general terms. However, the account goes beyond Putnam's by not just defending a version of social externalism, but also defending the thesis that the truth conditional meaning of many evaluative terms is not fi xed by experts either and instead constantly contested as part of a normal function of language.

I present the results of a set of corpus-based studies concerning adjective order preferences in German. The findings call into question some recent universal claims about adjective order, and add some coverage of German to an area of research where it has been underrepresented.

When one deliberates one has reasons both for and against doing something.  Could the reasons for OBJECTIVELY outweigh the reasons against, in the sense that someone who thought otherwise would simply be wrong?  (This is not the same question as that of whether any of the competing reasons could be objectively valid in itself.)  Three seemingly relevant kinds of ethical theory are examined: virtue ethics, utilitarianism and moral absolutism.  It is suggested that the proponents of these have all so far failed to show that they can give compelling objective reasons for acting on certain reasons rather than others.  We so far lack any conception of what sort of second-order considerations could adjudicate between competing reasons.  This is not so much an ‘error theory’ in J. L. Mackie’s sense as an admission of ignorance.

The aim of this work is to defend that aesthetic predicates and predicates of personal taste are quite similar in some respects. Specifically, we will show that the use of aesthetic predicates can give rise to situations of faultless disagreement, a feature rather associated with predicates of personal taste than with aesthetic predicates.

This paper examines the elements, structure and formation process of derived categories, by analyzing the properties of nouns derived from adjectives in Spanish. It is shown that, although it is commonly assumed that deadjectival nouns denote qualities (wisdom, beauty) or states (sadness, perplexity), there is a group (imprudence, cruelty) that refers to occurrences of events (Beauseroy, 2009). It is proposed that such occurrential nominalizations are possible only when derived from evaluative adjectives because only these can be predicated of events in addition to the sentient individual (Stowell, 1991).

This paper offers an analysis of the Hebrew focus sensitive particle bixlal and its accented version BIXLAL. It argues that both particles are members of the typology of even-like operators in Hebrew, along the unmarked particle afilu, but that BIXLAL is special in that instead of standardly associating with overt focused material, it is constrained to associate with focused material which is covert (and hence prosodically null). BIXLAL is thus constrained to operate over ‘covert-based’ alternatives. To illustrate this suggestion, the paper shows how a range of special readings found when BIXLAL appears in sentences with one dimensional and multi-dimensional adjectives in the positive form (paraphrased as very, -er than, in general, at all etc) can be derived by assuming that BIXLAL denotes the same operation as even, but that it associates with the covert comparison class argument of POS in such sentences, leading to a higher standard with the prejacent of BIXLAL compared to the standard with its alternatives. A general conclusion of the paper, then, is that the (in)ability of scalar focus sensitive particles to associate with covert material and to operate over ‘covert-based’ alternatives should be added to the inventory of parameters along which such particles have been reported to vary, both within and across languages. The paper ends by comparing BIXLAL to other scalar particles which can be analyzed as associating with covert material cross-linguistically, and by examining the behavior of BIXLAL in light theories of even-based NPIs (like ‘at all’) and of the focus-prosody correlation.

The aspectual properties of evaluative adjectives (EAs), such as brave and cruel, have been the object of a vivid debate, as they pattern with individual-level predicates (ILP) with respect to the interpretation of bare subjects and their inability to function as depictive adjuncts but, like stage-level predicates, they can have an episodic reading. In addition to this, among adjectives they exhibit exceptional aspectual properties, such as taking the progressive. In this paper, we concentrate on EAs in English and Spanish and argue that they can be characterised as Davidsonian-states, that is, stative event predicates. However, since EAs alternate clearly between two distinct readings–suggesting that the event is not part of the adjective’s lexical entry (unlike D-state verbs such as sleep or wait)–we analyze them as ILPs with the ability to predicate of two sorts of subject: an individual or an event. In the first case they behave like ILPs, in the second they exhibit all the aspectual properties associated with eventive predicates.

The current study is aimed at analyzing and comparing augmentation processes in Persian and Japanese languages based on the theory of evaluative morphology. According to evaluative morphology, a linguistic construction is evaluative if it conveys (consciously or subconsciously) a type of value of the referents or audience, according to the speaker's judgment. Morphology provides the speakers of a language with different means and ways for expression of evaluation in language and plays a dominant role in the formation of evaluatives. Diminutives and augmentatives are two main forms of evaluation in languages. As diminutives are much more common in languages and are generally formed by affixes specifically developed for this function, they are also investigated more pervasively than augmentatives. This is also true for Persian and Japanese linguistics where augmentatives, at least in the case of Persian, have so far been neglected or have only been sporadically touched upon in grammar books. The findings of this study showed that although Persian and Japanese belong to two different language families and are typologically placed in two different language types, both use compounding and reduplication as two dominant mechanisms for producing augmentatives. The present study aims to provide a detailed examination and comparison of these two mechanisms for the formation of augmentatives in two languages.

The aspectual properties of evaluative adjectives (EAs), such as brave and cruel, have been the object of a vivid debate, as they pattern with individual-level predicates (ILP) with respect to the interpretation of bare subjects and their inability to function as depictive adjuncts but, like stage-level predicates, they can have an episodic reading. In addition to this, among adjectives they exhibit exceptional aspectual properties, such as taking the progressive. In this paper, we concentrate on EAs in English and Spanish and argue that they can be characterised as Davidsonian-states, that is, stative event predicates. However, since EAs alternate clearly between two distinct readings–suggesting that the event is not part of the adjective’s lexical entry (unlike D-state verbs such as sleep or wait)–we analyze them as ILPs with the ability to predicate of two sorts of subject: an individual or an event. In the first case they behave like ILPs, in the second they exhibit all the aspe...

Empirical studies of the characteristics of subjective adjectives. We uncover new insights about subjectivity and its components, present evidence of several sorts of subjective adjective, and underscore the need to be aware of very different definitions of subjectivity in the literature.

Economics discourse is now seen as characterized by intersubjectivity and interactivity, since economists take a stance by using lexico-grammatical elements and rhetorical features to build a convincing argument from a personal perspective, to attain solidarity with readers, and to claim social participation in the economics community. Evaluation and particularly evaluative adjectives are thus a crucial feature of economics discourse. Taking a qualitative and quantitative approach, this study explores, in a small specialized corpus, the functions of evaluative adjectives, their variation across genres and registers, and whether they are constrained by the specific domain of economics. Findings show that evaluative adjectives can adopt more than one function simultaneously, they vary across genres and registers, and that they are strongly constrained by domain. Moreover, given the need to use specialized language internationally, this study wants to build, especially in NNS economists, an awareness of the features which typify economics discourse and a better understanding of the crucial role evaluative adjectives hold when economists have to communicate critical perspectives while building their professional persona

Double negation (not unhappy) has been associated with the rhetorical figure litotes and thereby has been connected to the pragmatic effects of mitigation and understatement (e.g. Horn 1989; Neuhaus 2016). The single negation (2) is typically not associated with this meaning potential.

(1) I’m not unhappy.
(2) I’m not happy.

In the standard account, the meaning potential of double negation has been explained with an antonymic scale between happy and unhappy (e.g. Horn 1989). A problem of this account is that it does not predict that the potential meaning of double negation is not usually associated with single negation in the same way. On the contrary, it has been observed that the negation of positively evaluating adjectives (not happy) allows for a negative strengthening effect, leading to a meaning very close to the morphologically negated term (unhappy) (Levinson 2000: 128).
In this talk, a corpus-driven perspective is used to deal with these distinct meaning potentials of double versus single negation. Evidence from German corpus data is presented which shows that nicht unglücklich (‘not unhappy’) is not a prototypical example for double negation in German. More frequent and typical in use are expressions like nicht unproblematisch (‘not unproblematic’) or nicht unähnlich (‘not unlike’). Different semantic features of these adjectives (entailments of the comparative, frequent modifiers) suggest, that an asymmetric scale (Rachidi 1989) is more suitable than a symmetric contrary scale to derive the meaning potential of double negation as well as the difference in meaning between double and single negation. It is argued that the type of opposition (contrary, asymmetric, contradictory) is an underspecified property which is standardised for some adjectives but which usually is context-sensitive.

References
Horn, Laurence R. 1989. The natural history of negation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Levinson, Stephen C. 2000. Presumptive meanings: The theory of generalized conversational implicature. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Neuhaus, Laura. 2016. Four Potential Meanings of Double Negation: The Pragmatics of nicht un-Constructions. International Review of Pragmatics 8. 55–81.
Rachidi, Renate. 1989. Gegensatzrelationen im Bereich deutscher Adjektive. Tübingen: Niemeyer.