Scalar Diversity, Negative Strengthening, and Adjectival Semantics

Gotzner, Nicole; Solt, Stephanie; Benz, Anton

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01659

Cited by 46 publications

(93 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…We've extended earlier work showing that negated lexical antonyms (e.g., not dull) are distinct from positive adjectives (e.g., sharp) when presented simultaneously (Giora, Balaban, Fein, & Alkabets, 2005) to both the case of morphological antonyms (e.g., not unhappy) and when presented in isolation (single utterance conditions). We also provide convergent evidence that supports the phenomenon of negative strengthening or inference towards the antonym, where negating an adjective (e.g., not intelligent) can lead to the stronger interpretation than literally implied (e.g., rather stupid; Ruytenbeek, Verheyen, & Spector, 2017;Gotzner, Solt, & Benz, 2018).…”

Section: Methodssupporting

confidence: 54%

Not unreasonable: Why two negatives don't make a positive

Tessler¹,

Franke²

2019

Preprint

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Logic tells us that two negatives make a positive, but in language, things are not so black and white: A person "not unhappy" may not be entirely happy. We hypothesize that innovative uses of double negatives like "not unhappy" stem from listeners entertaining flexible meanings for negation markers like "not" and "un-", which context can then help disambiguate. We formalize this hypothesis in a computational model of language understanding, which predicts that "not unhappy" means something different from "happy" but also makes the additional prediction that single negations ("unhappy" vs. "not happy") are interpreted identically except when a speaker uses both in the same context, which we confirm experimentally. Even double negations that flagrantly use the same negation marker twice (e.g., "not not happy") are interpreted in subtle ways. These findings suggest that even one of the most logical elements of language—negation—can mean many things at once.

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Section: Methodssupporting

confidence: 54%

Not unreasonable: Why two negatives don't make a positive

Tessler¹,

Franke²

2019

Preprint

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“…Indeed, this is consistent with previous work showing that people prefer to use negation ("that's not true" as opposed to "that's false") when prompted to speak more "politely" (Giora, Balaban, Fein, & Alkabets, 2005) and that utterances involving negation tend to be interpreted in a more MODELING POLITE SPEECH 22 mitigated and hedged manner compared to direct utterances (H. L. Colston, 1999). It also may help explain the phenomenon of negative strengthening, where negation of a positive adjective can be interpreted in a rather negative manner (e.g., "He's not brilliant" meaning "he is rather unintelligent"; Gotzner, Solt, & Benz, 2018;Horn, 1989). In order to conduct quantitative model comparisons, we needed to create an experiment with repeated trials and a restricted range of choices.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Polite speech emerges from competing social goals

Yoon¹,

Frank²,

Tessler³

et al. 2018

Preprint

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Language is a remarkably efficient tool for transmitting information. Yet human speakers make statements that are inefficient, imprecise, or even contrary to their own beliefs, all in the service of being polite. What rational machinery underlies polite language use? Here, we show that polite speech emerges from the competition of three communicative goals: to convey information, to be kind, and to present oneself in a good light. We formalize this goal tradeoff using a probabilistic model of utterance production, which predicts human utterance choices in socially-sensitive situations with high quantitative accuracy, and we show that our full model is superior to its variants with subsets of the three goals. This utility-theoretic approach to speech acts takes a step towards explaining the richness and subtlety of social language use.

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“…on some dimensions identified as important in recent work on adjectival scales Gotzner et al, 2018;Leffel et al, 2019).…”

Section: 1mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This possibility seems worth exploring in light of recent work on negative strengthening (Benz et al, 2018;Gotzner et al, 2018). Negative strengthening occurs when the negation of a stronger term is taken to imply that a weaker term is also not applicable (e.g., when "not brilliant" is interpreted as 'not intelli-International Review of Pragmatics 12 (2020) 1-43 gent').…”

Section: Previous Work On Scalar Diversity Building Onmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Benz et al (2018) found that adjectives more likely to be negatively strengthened were less likely to be interpreted in a two-sided way in Van Tiel et al's (2016) results; in other words, they found a negative correlation between negative strengthening and SI-rate derivation. Gotzner et al (2018) investigated the structure of the corresponding adjectival scales and added vagueness (no context-independent standards) and adjectival extremeness to the list of factors affecting the likelihood of a two-sided reading.…”

Section: Previous Work On Scalar Diversity Building Onmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Different scalar terms are affected by face differently

2020

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Research on the effect of face-orientation on scalar implicatures has claimed that face-threatening contexts are one type of context in which scalar implicatures are not warranted. However, that research has been based on the two staples of scalar implicature research, some and or. Given research on scalar diversity has shown that these terms are rather exceptional in inducing high rates of scalar implicatures, we believe it is time for a reassessment. We explored the relationship between scalar implicatures and face concerns by means of an experiment involving eight types of scalar terms in face-boosting and face-threatening contexts. While our results showed that some and or reliably tended to induce scalar implicatures in both types of contexts, confirming the findings of scalar diversity research in this respect, we failed to replicate previous findings that face-threatening contexts do not induce scalar implicatures. We discuss reasons for these findings and how face concerns should be implemented for future experimentation in this vein.

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Scalar Diversity, Negative Strengthening, and Adjectival Semantics

Cited by 46 publications

References 25 publications

Not unreasonable: Why two negatives don't make a positive

Not unreasonable: Why two negatives don't make a positive

Polite speech emerges from competing social goals

Different scalar terms are affected by face differently

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