A Typology of Multidimensional Adjectives

Abstract

This paper presents corpus-based evidence for a typology of multidimensional adjectives, like for example, healthy and sick. The interpretation of the latter is sensitive to multiple dimensions, such as blood pressure, pulse, sugar, cancer, etc. The study investigated the frequency of exception phrases, which operate on an implicit universal quantifier over adjectival dimensions, as in healthy, except for a slight cold, and not sick, except for high cholesterol. On the emerging typology, adjectives classify by the way their dimensions are glued together to create a single, uniform interpretation. The default interpretation of adjectives such as healthy involves implicit universal quantification over dimensions (dimension conjunction), while that of adjectives such as sick involves existential quantification (dimension disjunction). In adjectives like intelligent, the force of quantification over dimensions is context relative. Moreover, the paper presents support to the hypotheses that antonym polarity and modifier distribution guide our choice of quantifiers over dimensions in different adjectives. Thus, this research sheds new light on the nature of negative antonymy in multidimensional adjectives, and on the distribution of degree modifiers and exception phrases among multidimensional antonyms. Finally, it raises new questions pertaining to multidimensional comparisons.  The research for this paper began thanks to the Orgler scholarship for PhD students, Tel Aviv University (2006-7), continued thanks to the Pratt scholarship, Ben Gurion University of the Negev and was completed thanks to funding of the project `On vagueness-and how to be precise enough' by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific . I warmly thank Nirit Kadmon, Fred Landman, Robert van Rooij, Frank Veltman, and the audiences of ESPP 16 (2008), IATL 25 (2009) and the linguistic colloquiums of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Bee'r-Sheva for their most helpful comments. Special thanks to

Asymmetric inference towards the antonym: Experiments into the polarity and morphology of negated adjectives

“…Second, there is a notion of evaluative polarity associated with adjectives that inherently involve a subjective judgment of (un)desirability (Boucher & Osgood 1969;Horn 1989: 330-361;Paradis et al 2012;Sassoon 2013). For such evaluative pairs, the positive member corresponds to the possession of the most desirable property.…”

Experience matters: A psycholinguistic investigation of predicates of personal taste

“…Kamp 1975;Klein 1980;Sassoon 2013;Kennedy 2013;Stojanovic & McNally 2017) is also commonly viewed as involving subjectivity. Adjective such as healthy, ugly, beautiful and stupid are multidimensional because they involve multiple criteria that can be used for ranking/ordering individuals with the property.…”

Adjectival and Adverbial Modification: The View from Modern Type Theories

“…blood pressure, cholesterol etc. (Sassoon 2012). Similarly, big may involve different dimensions like height, width etc.…”

“…Cases of multidimensional adjectives rely heavily on the context with respect to the dimensions that need to be satisfied in order for an utterance to be felicitous. The insight provided by Sassoon (2012) is that there are two classes of multidimensional adjectives, positive and negative. Positive adjectives incude cases like healthy, while negative ones cases like sick.…”

“…Such cases include adjectives like sick, healthy etc. Two different classes of multidimensional adjectives are distinguished (Sassoon 2012), positive and negative. Basically, every positive adjective has a negative counterpart, its antonym.…”