The meaning of negated adjectives
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Tamar Fraenkel
Abstract
The study investigates the way people use and make sense of negated adjectives. Past research showed that by using a negated adjective, instead of an available antonym, one is able to communicate a mitigated sense of that antonym. To illustrate, by saying ‘not hot’ one can communicate ‘neither hot, but not quite cold’. This effect has been termed the mitigation hypothesis. Our theoretical analysis suggests that the extent of mitigation should vary as a function of two factors. First, mitigation should be more pronounced for contraries (adjectives that lie on a continuum) than for contradictories (adjectives that form a dichotomy); Second, the extent of meaning mitigation of marked adjectives should be stronger than that of unmarked adjectives. Finally, we hypothesized that these two factors interact, so that the markedness effect should be stronger for contraries than for contradictories. We report results from three experiments that tested these hypotheses with native speakers of Hebrew and discuss alternative mechanisms that might lead to mitigation of negated terms. We also address the practical importance of our findings for questionnaire design and communication.
© 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Preface: Discourse negation — costs and effects
- Context effects on the spontaneous production of negation
- Comprehending negation: A study with adults diagnosed with high functioning autism or Asperger's syndrome
- Accessibility of negated constituents in reading and listening
- Negated concepts interfere with anaphor resolution
- How can you compare! On negated comparisons as comparisons
- The meaning of negated adjectives
- Contributors to this issue
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Preface: Discourse negation — costs and effects
- Context effects on the spontaneous production of negation
- Comprehending negation: A study with adults diagnosed with high functioning autism or Asperger's syndrome
- Accessibility of negated constituents in reading and listening
- Negated concepts interfere with anaphor resolution
- How can you compare! On negated comparisons as comparisons
- The meaning of negated adjectives
- Contributors to this issue
