Scalar diversity and ignorance inferences: An experimental study on 'at least' as a modifier of numerals vs. adjectives

This work presents results from an experiment that investigates whether at least as a modifier of gradable adjectives (e.g., at least misleading) triggers speaker ignorance inferences just as has been established for at least as a numeral modifier (e.g., at least two). I find that, while at least gives rise to ignorance inferences with both types of scalar expressions, this happens in varying degrees, contra existing accounts of at least (Geurts & Nouwen 2007; Cohen & Krifka 2014) and in line with experimental evidence on the scalar inferences of unmodified adjectives and numerals (Doran, Baker, McNabb, Larson & Ward 2009), known as scalar diversity. I also find indications that the scale structure of adjectives may affect the availability of ignorance inferences, as in the case of scalar implicature computation for unmodified adjectives (Gotzner, Solt & Benz 2018a), yet in a reverse manner.

Face Management and Negative Strengthening: The Role of Power Relations, Social Distance, and Gender

Negated gradable adjectives often convey an interpretation that is stronger than their literal meaning, which is referred to as ‘negative strengthening.’ For example, a sentence like ‘John is not kind’ may give rise to the inference that John is rather mean. Crucially, negation is more likely to be pragmatically strengthened in the case of positive adjectives (‘not kind’ to mean rather mean) than negative adjectives (‘not mean’ to mean rather kind). A classical explanation of this polarity asymmetry is based on politeness, specifically on the potential face threat of bare negative adjectives (Horn, 1989; Brown and Levinson, 1987). This paper presents the results of two experiments investigating the role of face management in negative strengthening. We show that negative strengthening of positive and negative adjectives interacts differently with the social variables of power, social distance, and gender.

Indonesian Civil War: Comparing Discourse In the Campaign of Jakarta’s 2017 Gubernatorial Election

Political discourse today is no longer dependent on the performance of the political elite; however, it has shifted to active participation of their supporters. This phenomenon is widely recorded in social media as the background event. Without exception to Jakarta’s 2017 Gubernatorial Election that received an international spotlight because the roar is so massive in the universe of cyberspace. This qualitative descriptive study examined the pattern of campaign movements as a political discourse conducted by the public in supporters community account as a form of public participation in the politics of free-active democracy. It aimed to map out the pattern of discourse movements arising from the supporter community accounts of one of the candidate through the perspective of the discourse comparison offered by Sawirman (2014). The findings show that there are three supporting accounts of candidates which posited as primary, secondary and tertiary discourse. For the configuration of the discourse, gradable adjectives are used as a linguistic strategy to weaken and to dispel sympathy for opposing factions. It is based on the spirit that speakers are superior to their rivals. In general, the pattern of discourse movements identified is synergistic and mutual in order to demonstrate the superiority of their group by degrading the opposing side.

The Grammar of Prominence

This chapter draws theoretical conclusions and outlines directions for future developments. It summarizes the key theoretical and philosophical upshots of the account developed in the book and discusses further extensions of this framework. It discusses how the account can be applied to model context-sensitivity of situated utterances, in a way that can offer insights into puzzles concerning disagreement in discourse and communication under ignorance, which have plagued standard accounts of context and content. Further, it outlines the way the account is to be extended and applied to various types of context-sensitive items, including relational expressions, gradable adjectives, and domain restriction.

Two linguistic models of the context-sensitivity of ‘know’

This article aims to assess the validity of two linguistic models of the context-sensitivity of the term ?know?: (I) indexical model, according to which knowledge ascriptions are context-sensitive due to an unstable Kaplanian character of the term ?know?, and (II) hidden-indexical model, that explains context sensitivity of ?know? by referring to its semantic similarities with gradable adjectives. This article is structured as follows. Section 1 briefly reviews contextualism as an epistemic position and introduces key features of both models. Section 2 establishes criteria for their evaluation: (A) their compatibility with our common linguistic practices, and (B) their compatibility with a contextualist solution to the problem of philosophical skepticism. Sections 3 and 4 examine two of the most prominent objections that aim to prove that each of these models fails to meet one or both of the aforementioned criteria. The article concludes that the hidden-indexical model, supplemented by Bloom-Tillman?s Modifiability Constraint, provides the more adequate linguistic support for the thesis of epistemic contextualism.

Comparisons of Equality With German so…wie, and the Relationship Between Degrees and Properties

We present a compositionally transparent, unified semantic analysis of two kinds of so…wie-equative constructions in German, namely degree equatives and property equatives in the domain of individuals or events. Unlike in English and many other European languages (Haspelmath & Buchholz 1998, Rett 2013), both equative types in German feature the parameter marker so, suggesting a unified analysis. We show that the parallel formal expression of German degree and property equatives is accompanied by a parallel syntactic distribution (in predicative, attributive, and adverbial position), and by identical semantic properties: Both equative types allow for scope ambiguities, show negative island effects out of context, and license the negative polarity item überhaupt ‘at all’ in the complement clause. As the same properties are also shared by German comparatives, we adopt the influential quantificational analysis of comparatives in von Stechow (1984ab), Heim (1985, 2001, 2007), and Beck (2011), and treat both German equative types in a uniform manner as expressing universal quantification over sets of degrees or over sets of properties (of individuals or events). Conceptually, the uniform marking of degree-related and property-related meanings is expected given that the abstract semantic category degree (type $d$) can be reconstructed in terms of equivalence classes, i.e., ontologically simpler sets of individuals (type $\langle e,t\rangle $) or events (type $\langle v,t\rangle $). These are found in any language, showing that whether or not a language makes explicit reference to degrees (by means of gradable adjectives, degree question words, degree-only equatives) does not follow on general conceptual or semantic grounds, but is determined by the grammar of that language.

Face management and negative strengthening: The role of power relations, social distance and gender

Negated gradable adjectives often convey an interpretation that is stronger than their literal meaning, which is referred to as ‘negative strengthening’. For example, a sentence like ‘John is not kind’ may give rise to the inference that John is rather mean. Crucially, negation is more likely to be pragmatically strengthened in the case of positive adjectives (‘not kind’ to mean rather mean) than negative adjectives (‘not mean’ to mean rather kind). A classical explanation of this polarity asymmetry is based on politeness, specifically on the potential face threat of bare negative adjectives (Horn, 1989, Brown & Levinson, 1987). This paper presents the results of two experiments investigating the role of face management in negative strengthening. We show that negative strengthening of positive and negative adjectives interacts differently with the social variables of power, social distance, and gender.

Warm (for Winter): Inferring comparison classes for gradable adjectives

The meaning of an utterance can change depending on the context. Yet, what counts as context is often only implicit in everyday conversation. The utterance “it’s warm outside” signals that the temperature outside is relatively high, but the temperature could be high relative to a number of different comparison classes: other days of the year, other weeks, other seasons, etc. Theories of context-sensitive language use agree that the comparison class is a crucial feature of meaning understanding, but little is known about how a listener decides upon a comparison class. We extend a Bayesian model of pragmatic reasoning to be able to reason flexibly about the comparison class intended by the speaker and test the qualitative predictions of this model using a large-scale free-production experiment. We then quantitatively synthesize the model and data using Bayesian data analysis, which further reveals that usage frequency and a preference for basic-level categories are two main contributors to comparison class inference. The methods and results we present open the door to studying richer aspects of context-sensitive language understanding.