Decomposition and Processing of Negative Adjectival Comparatives

Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 22, 1

“…The preliminary evidence they produced suggests a marked difference between the two types: when a two-way ANOVA is performed over data from positive and negative adjectival antonyms and polar quantifiers, an interaction effect emerges. That is, the difference between antonyms is significantly smaller that the difference between polar quantifiers (see also Tucker, Tomaszewicz and Wellwood, 2017 for a recent experimental exploration).…”

Measuring the cognitive cost of downward monotonicity by controlling for negative polarity

“…If the polarity effect in quantifiers stems from a "less than" computation (<), as given in the denotations in (5b) and (6b), a similar polarity effect in adjectives is also expected. Indeed, there are some hints that negative adjectives are more cognitively costly than positive adjectives (Clark & Card 1969;Just & Carpenter 1971;Sherman 1976;Tucker, Tomaszewicz & Wellwood 2018), but in these experiments a polarity effect in dimensional adjectives was not the main interest and therefore the contrast was not a clean one. Importantly, it was not directly compared with that of quantifiers.…”

Negative sentences exhibit a sustained effect in delayed verification tasks.

“…Context cannot explain the well-known interaction of polarity with truth value: The polarity effect is smaller for false sentences (i.e., mismatch between sentence and picture) than it is for true sentences. This highly replicable finding suggests that truth value also is an important factor (Agmon et al, 2019;Carpenter & Just, 1975;Just & Carpenter, 1971;Krueger, 1972;Mac-Donald et al, 1992;Mayo et al, 2004;Tucker et al, 2018).…”

“…In addition to the polarity of the sentence which was expressed with yeš or ‘eyn (Sentential Polarity; Polarity-Sen), we added a factor of quantifier polarity (Quantificational Polarity; Polarity-Qua) that can be positive or negative. Negative quantifiers are often analyzed as an instance of implicit negation (Clark, 1976; Heim, 2006; Klima, 1964; Penka, 2011) and evoke a polarity effect in verification tasks relative to their positive counterparts (Deschamps et al, 2015; Just & Carpenter, 1971; Tucker et al, 2018). Specifically in this experiment, we used the comparative quantifiers yoter ( more ) and paxot ( fewer , a one-morpheme word) 7 .…”