Negative strengthening: The interplay of evaluative polarity and scale structure

Abstract

This work investigates absolute adjectives in the not very construction and how their pragmatic interpretation depends on the evaluative polarity and the scale structure of their antonymic pairs. Our experimental study reveals that evaluatively positive adjectives (clean) are more likely to be strengthened than evaluatively negative ones (dirty), and that maximum standard adjectives (clean or closed) are more likely to be strengthened than minimum standard ones (dirty or open). Our findings suggest that both evaluative polarity and scale structure drive the asymmetric interpretation of gradable adjectives under negation. Overall, our work adds to the growing literature on the interplay between pragmatic inference, valence and semantic meaning.