Asymmetric inference towards the antonym: Experiments into the polarity and morphology of negated adjectives

Glossa a journal of general linguistics Ruytenbeek, Nicolas, et al. 2017. Asymmetric inference towards the antonym: Experiments into the polarity and morphology of negated adjectives. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 2(1): 92. 1–27, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.151 RESEARCH Asymmetric inference towards the antonym: Experiments into the polarity and morphology of negated adjectives Nicolas Ruytenbeek1, Steven Verheyen2 and Benjamin Spector2 1 Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique-FNRS, Research Centre in Linguistics (LaDisco), Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), 50, av. F. R. Roosevelt, 1050, BE 2 Institut Jean Nicod, Département d’études cognitives, ENS, EHESS, PSL Research University, CNRS, Paris, FR Corresponding author: Nicolas Ruytenbeek () In this paper, we investigate the interpretation of negated antonyms. A sentence such as Peter is not tall can be understood as meaning either that Peter is not tall tout court or that Peter is rather short (inference towards the antonym; ITA). We present the results of two experiments, in which we test two theoretical predictions. First, according to Krifka (2007), it is reasonable to expect a stronger ITA effect for positive versus negative adjectives. Second, elaborating on Krifka (2007), we expect ITA strength asymmetry to be greater for morphological antonymic pairs than for non-morphological pairs. In the first experiment, ITA strength was assessed implicitly by having participants judge the pragmatic acceptability of sentences involving a negated adjective and its antonym. In the second experiment, we collected explicit inferential judgments. The results of both experiments support the two predictions. We also discuss theoretical and methodological issues concerning the different notions of polarity. Keywords: gradable adjectives; negation; antonymy; mitigation 1 Theoretical background 1.1 General introduction Many adjectives have antonyms, that is they stand in opposition to adjectives with which they are incompatible (Lehrer & Lehrer 1982; Cruse 1986). For example, a man cannot be said to be both tall and short at the same time. According to the traditional view of the semantics of antonymic adjectives, items such as tall and short are contraries in that they allow for a middle term such as medium or middle-sized (Horn 1989: 6–21). For instance, the first part of a sentence such as (1) is perfectly coherent, but a sentence such as (2) is clearly a contradiction. (1) (Edith Templeton, Gordon, 1966) He was neither short nor tall, slender and narrow-boned, of an unimpressive physique I did not care for. (2) This integer is neither even nor odd. Contrary adjectives stand in opposition to contradictory adjectives such as odd and even, or dead and alive, which follow the law of excluded middle. In the case of contradictory antonyms, the negation of one member of a pair should thus result in the affirmation of Art. 92, page 2 of 27 Ruytenbeek et al: Asymmetric inference towards the antonym the other member of that pair. But in the case of contrary antonyms, the negation of one member of a pair is not in general equivalent to the affirmation of the other member of that pair. Contrary antonyms are generally gradable, scalar adjectives. For instance, both tall and short are associated with the scale of height, and are used to locate an object on this scale. An object is tall if its height is above a certain threshold θtall, and an object is short if its height is below a certain threshold θshort, but an object whose height is between these two thresholds is neither tall nor short. This approach can be generalized to all pairs of contrary adjectives. On this basis, the negation of an adjective such as tall corresponds to a scale region which properly contains the region corresponding to short, as illustrated in Figure 1, and so not tall does not entail short. Things are, however, more complex. First, the threshold for tallness (θtall) is highly context-dependent. Second, speakers do not have in mind, in most contexts, a precise threshold for tallness. If someone’s height is slightly above average, it is not clear whether the person is or is not tall—such cases are called borderline cases. In practice, when it is asserted that a person is tall, what is meant is that this person is clearly tall, i.e., tall is not normally used for someone whose height may or may not be above the threshold, depending on its precise value. To account for this fact, several approaches have been developed. In trivalent approaches to vagueness (see, e.g., Fine 1975), the view is that the sentence Peter is tall is undefined, rather than true or false, if Peter’s height falls into the “unclear” zone, and its negation, Peter is not tall, comes out undefined as well. As a result, the relationship between tall and not tall is quite similar to that of tall and short: it is possible for a person to be neither clearly tall nor clearly not tall. In the epistemic approach to vagueness (Williamson 1994), the view is that the sentence John is tall is always either true or false, but that speakers do not have a complete grasp of its truth-conditions: there is a zone of heights such that speakers do not know whether a person whose height falls in this zone is tall or not tall. As a result, to be able to assert Peter is tall while respecting Grice’s (1975) maxim of quantity, it has to be the case that Peter’s height is located above this zone, and to be able to assert Peter isn’t tall, Peter’s height must be below this zone. In this approach as well, then, from the point of view of actual use, the relationship between tall and not tall becomes similar to that of tall and short: for both the pair tall/short and the pair tall/not tall, there is a zone of indifference such that neither member of the pair can be used to describe an individual whose height falls in this zone (see also von Stechow 2009). Given that the boundaries of the zone of indifference are themselves highly contextdependent and vague, the conditions under which not tall is used might well be more or less the same as those that regulate the use of short. And in fact, there are contexts where not tall seems to imply short, or, similarly, not large will imply small and not good will imply bad. Consider the following examples:1,2 (3) a. b. c. d. Rooms not large, but not small either.1 My bedroom is not large. Because I don’t like small rooms, I spend little time in it. Macaroni salad is just ok. Not good but not bad either.2 It’s not good. Don’t use it. (COCA Davies 2008) https://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowUserReviews-g293923-d580062-r13666773-Ha_Long_Bay_HotelHalong_Bay_Quang_Ninh_Province.html. 2 https://www.yelp.com/biz_photos/uncles-shack-and-grill-brooklyn-2?select=M4Suv-oztO578SbG32C9Ow. 1 Ruytenbeek et al: Asymmetric inference towards the antonym Art. 92, page 3 of 27 Figure 1: Ranges of application for tall, its negation, and its antonym short. Somewhat impression (...truncated)