Evaluational adjectives

Silk, Alex

doi:10.1111/phpr.12635

Cited by 8 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 82 publications

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“…8 This characterization of evaluativity brings together two important ideas: on the one hand, the idea of valence -positive vs. negative -, and on the other, that of relativity to a standard. While standard-relativity is certainly central to the way in which, for instance, Bierwisch (1989) and Silk (2021) approach evaluative (or evaluational) adjectives, it is an aspect to which we will pay little attention here. Rather, we shall focus on the idea that "evaluative" expressions are intimately tied to the notion of expressing something positive or negative about their subject.…”

Section: Ppts Subjectivity and Evaluativitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring Valence in Judgments of Taste

Stojanovic¹,

Kaiser²

2022

Perspectives on Taste

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Judgments of taste are often assumed to be evaluative, in the sense of expressing either a positive or a negative assessment of the object under evaluation. However, the evaluative character of predicates of personal taste (PPTs) has received relatively little attention from a semantic point of view. Our aim is to fill out this lacuna. We show that PPTs do not divide neatly into positively and negatively valenced terms. Instead, we suggest that many PPTs, such as 'surprising' and 'intense', are neutral: they are underspecified for their valence and, depending on the context, can give rise to a positive, a negative, or an ambivalent evaluation. We investigate how such neutral PPTs differ from evaluative PPTs, and how they differ from certain other terms that are neither positive nor negative, such as 'average'. We use a two-pronged approach. First, we propose two novel linguistic tests that serve as diagnostics to distinguish the class of neutral PPTs from valenced PPTs, and we use corpus examples to corroborate the tests. Second, we use information from pre-existing psychological norms of valence to further explore the class of adjectives that we hypothesize are neutral.

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Section: Ppts Subjectivity and Evaluativitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring Valence in Judgments of Taste

Stojanovic¹,

Kaiser²

2022

Perspectives on Taste

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“…Call uses such as those in (48)-(49), (52)-(54) -uses which distinguish among worlds in the CS based on features determining the representation of context g c in those worlds, and propose to adjust live values for a contextual parameterdiscourse-oriented uses. It's controversial how to model the discourse dynamics of discourse-oriented uses (in my terminology) in assertions and questions (for relevant discussion see Barker [4], Murray [41], Silk [63,65,68]; also n. 9). What is important here is simply that uses of endorsing-epistemic questions in conversation can have an effect of partitioning the worlds in the CS based on whether the concrete discourse situation in those worlds determines a value for P e that bears the stated logical relation to the proposition embedded under the modal.…”

Section: Epistemic Modal Sentences Semantically Express Propositions mentioning

confidence: 99%

Expectation Biases and Context Management with Negative Polar Questions

Silk

2019

J Philos Logic

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This paper examines distinctive discourse properties of preposed negative yes/no questions (NPQs), such as Isn't Jane coming too?. Unlike with other yes/no questions, using an NPQ ∼p? invariably conveys a bias toward a particular answer, where the polarity of the bias is opposite of the polarity of the question: using the negative question ∼p? invariably expresses that the speaker previously expected the positive answer p to be correct. A prominent approach-what I call the contextmanagement approach, developed most extensively by Romero and Han (Linguistics and Philosophy, 27, 609-658 2004)-attempts to capture speaker expectation biases by treating NPQs fundamentally as epistemic questions about the proper discourse status of a proposition. I raise challenges for existing context-managing accounts to provide more adequate formalizations of the posited context-managing content, its implementation in the compositional semantics and discourse dynamics, and its role in generating the observed biases. New data regarding discourse differences between NPQs and associated epistemic modal questions are introduced. I argue that we can capture the roles of NPQs in expressing speakers' states of mind and managing the discourse common ground without positing special context-managing operators or treating NPQs as questions directly about the context. I suggest that we treat the operator introduced with preposed negation as having an ordinary semantics of epistemic necessity, though lexically associated with a general kind of endorsing use observed with modal expressions. The expressive and context-managing roles of NPQs are explained in terms of a general kind of discourse-oriented use of context-sensitive language. The distinctive expectation biases and discourse properties observed with NPQs are derived from the proposed semantics and a general principle of Discourse Relevance.

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“…The property in virtue of which the comparative form of an adjective gives rise to subjective disagreement is called ORDERING SUBJECTIVITY (Bylinina 2017;McNally and Stojanovic 2017;Solt 2018; see also Silk 2019). Ordering subjectivity distinguishes adjectives like 'good', 'beautiful' or 'tasty' from dimensional adjectives like 'tall' or 'wide'.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%