Typicality and Graded Membership in Dimensional Adjectives

Abstract

This paper concerns an investigation of the manner in which typicality constrains graded membership in antonymous dimensional adjectives such as short/tall and cheap/expensive using the conceptual spaces framework. In this framework, items are organized in a space comprised of one or more dimensions along which they can be compared. The items' graded membership is established by their relative proximity in this space to the prototypical instances of contrasting concepts. Because dimensional adjectives can be applied to an indefinite variety of things and grammatically have no upper bound to serve as cognitive reference point, they have been argued to lack prototypes. We present the results of an empirical study showing that the conceptual spaces framework can nevertheless be extended successfully to dimensional adjectives by complementing them with a comparison class argument (such as short/tall for an adult man and cheap/expensive for a smartphone), allowing participants to retrieve meaningful prototypical instances, which can be used to establish membership degree. Since dimensional adjectives are subjective, we investigate how the framework can accommodate interindividual variability in membership degree judgments. We find that the predictions of the framework significantly improve if prototypical instances themselves are assumed to come with a gradient instead of being considered equally typical, thereby providing a more fine-grained account of typicality and furthering the development of the conceptual spaces framework.

Lexicosemantic, affective, and distributional norms for 1,000 Dutch adjectives

“…Our norms add a substantive number of adjectives to the growing set of Dutch experiential and distributional norms, and can easily be connected to the behavioral norm data that are amassing for Dutch, pertaining to lexical decision (Brysbaert, Stevens, Mandera, & Keuleers, 2016;Keuleers, Diependaele, & Brysbaert, 2010b), word prevalence (Keuleers et al, 2015), text reading (Cop, Dirix, Drieghe, & Duyck, 2017), and word fragment completion (Heyman, Van Akeren, Hutchison, & Storms, 2016). We believe the norms would benefit both research that studies adjectives proper (e.g., to establish a typology; Dixon, 1982;Raskin & Nirenburg, 1998) or in which adjectives constitute the preferred stimulus material such as vagueness (Hampton, 2011;Kennedy, 2007;Van Rooij, 2011;Verheyen & Egré, 2018), spatial cognition (Bianchi, Savardi, & Burro, 2011a;Bianchi, Savardi, & Kubovy, 2011b), affective word processing (Bernat, Bunce, & Shevrin, 2001;Herbert, Kissler, Junghofer, Peyk, & Rockstroh, 2006), and inference (Gotzner, Solt, & Benz, 2018;Ruytenbeek, Verheyen, & Spector, 2017). The norms can be used both as explanatory variables (Gilet & Jallais, 2011;Kuperman et al, 2014) and control variables (Estes & Adelman, 2008a;Larsen, Mercer, & Balota, 2006).…”

Subjectivity in gradable adjectives: The case oftallandheavy

“…Most accounts of vagueness would expect the response patterns of individual participants to display a so‐called Guttman pattern or monotonicity (Guttman, ): a cut‐off point is situated along the dimension underlying the stimuli (height, weight) prior to which the predicate is consistently denied and after which the predicate is consistently applied . Even for stimuli like ours that vary only along one dimension (height or weight), violations of monotonicity are observed (Douven, Wenmackers, Jraissati & Decock, ; Verheyen & Égré, ). That is, subsequent stimuli receive alternating responses.…”

“…A product might be considered expensive in light of one's current income but affordable in light of one's anticipated income (e.g., once a debt has been paid off or one is promoted). For a range of these predicates, we are in the process of assessing how subjectivity in descriptive, normative values versus subjectivity in prescriptive ideals affects their use (Verheyen & Égré, ). The finding that people's culinary taste is a marker of age (Stevens, ) and one's taste in arts is a marker of social class and level of education (Bourdieu, ) suggests that the framework can also be fruitfully extended to the study of individual differences in the use of predicates of personal taste such as tasty (Lasersohn, ) and aesthetic adjectives such as beautiful (McNally & Stojanovic, ).…”

Can we Use Conceptual Spaces to Model Moral Principles?

“…Some cases will fall within the region covered by one principle on one delineation, but in the region of another principle on another delineation. The proportion of times a case falls under a particular principle (i.e., is found to be more similar to a chosen prototype of one principle than to a choice of prototypes representing other principles) can be used as a rough measure of the extent to which the principle applies Douven 2016;Douven et al 2017;Verheyen and Égré 2018. See also Peterson 2017: Chapter 2).…”

“…The theory of conceptual spaces introduced by Gärdenfors (2000Gärdenfors ( , 2014 has been applied to topics in psychology, linguistics, computer science, and philosophy (e.g., Chella et al 2001;Cubek et al 2015;Douven 2016Douven et al 2013;Gärdenfors and Zenker 2013;Valentine et al 2016;Verheyen and Égré 2018;Zenker and Gärdenfors, 2015). As explained by Douven and Gärdenfors (2019), the central idea is that concepts can be modelled as regions in similarity spaces.…”