Adjectival polarity and the processing of scalar inferences

What it is about

Bott and Noveck (2004) found that judging "some" as false (the scalar inference "not all") takes longer than judging it true. This is the B&N effect, usually read as a processing cost of scalar inference. Later studies found it for some scales and not others. The authors test the polarity hypothesis: only scalar words that are positive give the effect, and negative words do not. They use 16 adjectival scales in a sentence-picture verification task with 50 Mechanical Turk participants; three were removed for accuracy below 80%. Each sentence-picture pair appeared three times, giving 144 trials. Polarity is not a yes/no label. It is a continuous score: the first principal component of four corpus and psychological diagnostics, which explains 47% of the variance. The diagnostics are "how" questions, "twice as" ratios, valence ratings and overall frequency. The model shows a three-way interaction of condition, response and polarity (b = 0.09, SE = 0.01, t = 6.00, p < .001). Of the seven scales with a B&N effect, six were positive; "youthful" is the exception. The authors conclude that the cost lies in verifying negative information, not in deriving the inference.

Ideas

• I1. en/src/morph.rs and 15. Adjectives and adverbs: a deterministic polarity score for Mova's adjectives, built from four counts (how-question neutrality, ratio-phrase counts, frequency, a valence list) and combined as a first principal component, with lexicon order fixed by BTreeMap. Check the licence of the valence and corpus data before use.
• I2. prag/src/infer.rs: when the weak scalar word is negative (low, scarce), keep its scalar inference in positive form ("scarce but present") rather than as a double negation. Test on the implicature items in world/src/knowledge.rs.
• I3. Negative control: pairs with the same picture and different polarity (warm and cool in the paper) should give different implicature rates in Mova's rule output. A shuffled polarity table must score worse.
• I4. Count negations per frame in prag/src/frames.rs and log the number of rule steps for each implicature. If the step count tracks negation rather than inference, the cost is in the negation, as the paper argues.

For Mova

The chapters are 15. Adjectives and adverbs (scalar adjectives and antonyms), 27. Negation (double negation) and 33. Implicature and presupposition. The code is en/src/morph.rs for antonym pairs, prag/src/infer.rs for scalar inference and prag/src/frames.rs for negation counts. The measure: agreement of the polarity score with the paper's ordering of the 16 scales, run twice for determinism.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5334/gjgl.1457

@article{tiel2021adjectival,
  title = {{Adjectival polarity and the processing of scalar inferences}},
  author = {Tiel, Bob van and Pankratz, Elizabeth},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2021},
  doi = {10.5334/gjgl.1457},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.1457}
}

References

67 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Barbet, Cécile & Guillaume Thierry. 2018. When some triggers a scalar inference out of the blue. An electrophysical study of a Stroop-like conflict elicited by single words. Cognition 177. 58–68. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2018.03.013 ↗
2. Benjafield, J. & J. Adams-Webber. 1976. The golden section hypothesis. British Journal of Psychology 67. 11–15. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8295.1976.tb01492.x ↗
3. Bott, Lewis & Ira A. Noveck. 2004. Some utterances are underinformative: The onset and time course of scalar inferences. Journal of Memory and Language 51. 437–457. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j. jml.2004.05.006 Boucher, Jerry & Charles E. Osgood. 1969. The Pollyanna hypothesis. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 8. 1–8. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-5371(69)80002-2 ↗
4. Breheny, Richard, Napoleon Katsos & John Williams. 2006. Are generalized scalar implicatures generated by default? An online investigation into the role of context in generating pragmatic inferences. Cognition 100. 434–463. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2005.07.003 ↗
5. Carpenter, Patricia A. & Marcel A. Just. 1975. Sentence comprehension: A psycholinguistic model of sentence verification. Psychological Review 82. 45–73. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1037/h0076248 ↗
6. Chemla, Emmanuel & Lewis Bott. 2014. Processing inferences at the semantics/pragmatics frontier: Disjunctions and free choice. Cognition 130. 380–396. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j. cognition.2013.11.013 Cheng, Chao-Ming & Huei-Jane Huang. 1980. The process of verifying affirmative and negative sentences against pictures. Memory & Cognition 8. 573–583. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03213777 ↗
7. Chevallier, Coralie, Deirdre Wilson, Francesca Happé & Ira Noveck. 2010. Scalar inferences in autism spectrum disorders. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 40. 1104–1117. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-010-0960-8 Chevallier, Coralie, Ira A. Noveck, Tatjana Nazir, Lewis Bott, Valentina Lanzetti & Dan Sperber. 2008. Making disjunctions exclusive. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 61. 1741–1760. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/17470210701712960 ↗
8. Cho, Jacee. 2020. Memory load effect in the real-time processing of scalar implicature. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 49. 865–884. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-020-09726-3 Glossa: a journal of general linguistics DOI: 10.5334/gjgl.1457 ↗
9. Clark, Herbert H. 1974. The chronometric study of meaning components. In Jacques Mehler (ed.), Problems actuels en psycholinguistique, 490–505. Paris, France: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. find
10. Clark, Herbert H. & Eve V. Clark. 1977. Psychology and language: An introduction to psycholinguistics. New York, NY: Harcourt. find
11. Clark, Herbert H. & William G. Chase. 1972. On the process of comparing sentences against pictures. Cognitive Psychology 3. 472–517. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(72)90019-9 ↗
12. Cremers, Alexandre & Emmanuel Chemla. 2014. Direct and indirect scalar implicatures share the same processing signature. In Salvatore Pistoia Reda (ed.), Pragmatics, semantics and the case of scalar implicatures, 201–227. London, United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137333285_8 Dänzer, Lars. 2020. The explanatory project of Gricean pragmatics. Mind & Language. DOI: https://doi. org/10.1111/mila.12295 De Neys, Wim & Walter Schaeken. 2007. When people are more logical under cognitive load: Dual task impact on scalar implicature. Experimental Psychology 54. 128–133. DOI: https://doi. org/10.1027/1618-3169.54.2.128 Degen, Judith & Michael K. Tanenhaus. 2016. Availability of alternatives and the processing of scalar implicatures: A visual world eye-tracking study. Cognitive Science 40. 172–201. DOI: https://doi. org/10.1111/cogs.12227 Degen, Judith & Michael K. Tanenhaus. 2019. Constraint-based pragmatic processing. In C. Cummins & N. Katsos (eds.), Handbook of experimental pragmatics, 21–38. Oxford, United Kingdom: University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198791768.013.8 ↗
13. Dieussaert, Kristien, Suzanne Verkerk, Ellen Gillard & Walter Schaeken. 2011. Some effort for some: Further evidence that scalar implicatures are effortful. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 64. 2352–2367. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2011.588799 ↗
14. Fauconnier, Gilles. 1975. Pragmatic scales and logical structure. Linguistic Inquiry 6. 353–375. find
15. Fodor, Janet D., Jerry A. Fodor & Merrill F. Garrett. 1975. The psychological unreality of semantic representations. Linguistic Inquiry 6. 515–531. find
16. Gazdar, Gerald. 1979. Pragmatics: implicature, presupposition, and logical form. New York, NY: Academic Press. find
17. Geurts, Bart. 2010. Quantity implicatures. Cambridge, United Kingdom: University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511975158 Geurts, Bart. 2019. Communication as commitment sharing: Speech acts, implicatures, common ground. Theoretical Linguistics 45. 1–30. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/tl-2019-0001 ↗
18. Geurts, Bart & Paula Rubio-Fernández. 2015. Pragmatics and processing. Ratio 28. 446–469. DOI: https:// doi.org/10.1111/rati.12113 Givón, Talmy. 1979. On understanding grammar. New York, NY: Academic Press. ↗
19. Glenberg, Arthur M., David A. Robertson, Jennifer L. Jansen & Mina C. Johnson-Glenberg. 1999. Not propositions. Journal of Cognitive Systems Research 1. 19–33. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S1389-0417(99)00004-2 ↗
20. Gotzner, Nicole, Stephanie Solt & Anton Benz. 2018. Scalar diversity, negative strenghtening, and adjectival semantics. Frontiers in Psychology 9. 1659. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01659 ↗
21. Greenberg, Joseph H. 1966. Language universals, with special reference to feature hierarchies. The Hague, The Netherlands: Mouton. find
22. Grice, H. P. 1975. Logic and conversation. In Peter Cole & Jerry L. Morgan (eds.), Syntax and semantics, volume 3: Speech acts, 41–58. New York, NY: Academic Press. find
23. Grodner, Daniel J., Natalie M. Klein, Kathleen M. Carbary & Michael K. Tanenhaus. 2010. “Some,” and possibly all, scalar inferences are not delayed: Evidence for immediate pragmatic enrichment. Cognition 116. 42–55. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2010.03.014 ↗
24. Heim, Irene. 2008. Decomposing antonyms? In A. Grønn (ed.), Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 12, 212–225. Oslo, Norway: ILOS. find
25. Horn, Laurence R. 1972. On the semantic properties of logical operators in English. University of California, Los Angeles dissertation. find
26. Horn, Laurence R. 1989. A natural history of negation. Chicago, IL: University Press. find
27. Huang, Yan. 2014. Pragmatics. Oxford, United Kingdom: University Press. find
28. Huang, Yi Ting & Jesse Snedeker. 2018. Some inferences still take time: Prosody, predictability, and the speed of scalar implicatures. Cognitive Psychology 102. 105–126. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j. cogpsych.2018.01.004 Ingram, Joanne, Christopher J. Hand & Greg Maciejewski. 2016. Exploring the measurement of markedness and its relationship with other linguistic variables. PLOS ONE 11. e0157141. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0157141 ↗
29. Kennedy, Chris & Louise McNally. 2005. Scale structure, degree modification, and the semantics of gradable predicates. Language 81. 345–381. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2005.0071 Glossa: a journal of general linguistics DOI: 10.5334/gjgl.1457 ↗
30. Kissine, Mikhail. 2016. Pragmatics as metacognitive control. Frontiers in Psychology 6. 2057. DOI: https:// doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.02057 Kuznetsova, Alexandra, Per Bruun Brockhoff & Rune Haubo Bojensen Christensen. 2013. lmerTest: Tests for random and fixed effects for linear mixed effect models (lmer objects of lme4 package) [R package]. ↗
31. Lehrer, Adrienne. 1985. Markedness and antonymy. Journal of Linguistics 21. 397–429. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S002222670001032X Lehrer, Adrienne & Keith Lehrer. 1982. Antonymy. Linguistics and Philosophy 5. 483–501. DOI: https://doi. org/10.1007/BF00355584 Levinson, Stephen. 2000. Presumptive meanings: The theory of generalized conversational implicature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/5526.001.0001 ↗
32. Lyons, John. 1968. Introduction to theoretical linguistics. Cambridge, United Kingdom: University Press. find
33. Marty, Paul & Emmanuel Chemla. 2013. Scalar implicatures: Working memory and a comparison with only. Frontiers in Psychology 4. 1–12. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00403 ↗
34. Marty, Paul, Jacopo Romoli, Yasutada Sudo, Bob van Tiel & Richard Breheny. 2020. Processing implicatures: A comparison between direct and indirect sis. Oral presentation at Experiments in Linguistic Meaning (ELM), Philadelphia, PA, September 16–18, 2020. find
35. Mohammad, Saif M. 2018. Obtaining reliable human ratings of valence, arousal, and dominance for 20,000 english words. In Proceedings of the annual conference of the association for computational linguistics (ACL). Melbourne, Australia. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/P18-1017 ↗
36. Moracchini, Sophie. 2019. Morphosyntax and semantics of degree constructions. Massachussetts Institute of Technology, Boston, MA dissertation. find
37. Morzycki, Marcin. 2015. Modification. Cambridge, United Kingdom: University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511842184 ↗
38. Nieuwland, Mante S. & Gina R. Kuperberg. 2008. When the truth is not too hard to handle. Psychological Science 19. 1213–1218. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02226.x ↗
39. Nouwen, Rick. 2020. Evaluation, extent, and Goldilocks. Unpublished manuscript, Utrecht University, The Netherlands. find
40. Noveck, Ira A. & A. Posada. 2003. Characterizing the time course of an implicature: An evoked potentials study. Brain and Language 85. 203–210. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0093-934X(03)00053-1 ↗
41. Noveck, Ira A. & Dan Sperber. 2007. The why and how of experimental pragmatics: The case of ‘scalar inferences’. In N. Burton-Roberts (ed.), Advances in pragmatics, 184–212. Basingstoke, United Kingdom: Palgrave. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-73908-0_10 ↗
42. Osgood, Charles & Meredith Martin Richards. 1973. From Yang and Yin to and or but. Language 49. 380– 412. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/412460 ↗
43. Paradis, Carita, Joost van de Weijer, Caroline Willners & Magnus Lindgren. 2012. Evaluative polarity of antonyms. Lingue e Linguaggio 11. 199–214. find
44. Politzer-Ahles, Stephen & Matthew E. Husband. 2018. Eye movement evidence for context-sensitive derivation of scalar inferences. Collabra 1. 1–13. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.100 ↗
45. Proctor, Robert W. & Yang Seok Cho. 2006. Polarity correspondence: A general principle for performance of speeded binary classification tasks. Psychological Bulletin 132. 416–442. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.132.3.416 Récanati, François. 1995. The alleged priority of literal interpretation. Cognitive Science 19. 207–232. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog1902_2 ↗
46. Rett, Jessica. 2008. The semantics of evaluativity. Oxford, United Kingdom: University Press. find
47. Romoli, Jacopo & Florian Schwarz. 2015. An experimental comparison between presuppositions and indirect scalar implicatures. In F. Schwarz (ed.), Experimental perspectives on presuppositions, 215–240. Cham, Germany: Springer. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07980-6_10 ↗
48. Ronai, Eszter & Ming Xiang. 2020. Pragmatic inferences are QUD sensitive: An experimental study. Journal of Linguistics. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226720000389 ↗
49. Ruytenbeek, Nicolas, Steven Verheyen & Benjamin Spector. 2017. Asymmetric inference towards the antonym: Experiments into the polarity and morphology of negated adjectives. Glossa 2. 1–27. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.151 ↗
50. Sassoon, Galit W. 2010. The degree functions of negative adjectives. Natural Language Semantics 18. 141– 181. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-009-9052-8 ↗
51. Schäfer, Roland. 2015. Processing and querying large web corpora with the COW14 architecture. In Piotr Bański, Hanno Biber, Evelyn Breiteneder, Marc Kupietz, Harald Lüngen & Andreas Witt (eds.), Proceedings of challenges in the management of large corpora 3 (CMLC-3), 28–34. Lancaster, United Kingdom: IDS. find
52. Schäfer, Roland & Felix Bildhauer. 2012. Building large corpora from the web using a new efficient tool chain. In Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Mehmet Uğur Doğan, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk & Stelios Piperidis (eds.), Proceedings of the eighth international conference on language resources and evaluation (LREC’12), 486–493. Istanbul, Turkey: ELRA. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics DOI: 10.5334/gjgl.1457 ↗
53. Sherman, Mark A. 1976. Adjectival negation and the comprehension of multiply negated sentences. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 15. 143–157. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-5371(76)90015-3 ↗
54. Soames, Scott. 1982. How presuppositions are inherited: A solution to the projection problem. Linguistic Inquiry 13. 483–545. find
55. Solt, Stephanie. 2015. Measurement scales in natural language. Language and Linguistics Compass 9. 14–32. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.12101 ↗
56. Sperber, Dan & Deirdre Wilson. 1987. Précis of relevance: communication and cognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 10. 697–754. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00055345 ↗
57. Sperber, Dan & Deirdre Wilson. 1995. Relevance: communication and cognition (2nd edition). Oxford, United Kingdom: Blackwell. find
58. Sun, Chao & Richard Breheny. 2019. Another look at the online processing of scalar inferences: An investigation of conflicting findings from visual-world eye-tracking studies. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2019.1678759 ↗
59. Tian, Ye, Richard Breheny & Heather J. Ferguson. 2010. Why we simulate negated information: A dynamic pragmatic account. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 63. 2305–2312. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2010.525712 ↗
60. Tomlinson Jr., John M., Todd M. Bailey & Lewis Bott. 2013. Possibly all of that and then some: Scalar implicatures are understood in two steps. Journal of Memory and Language 69. 18–35. DOI: https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2013.02.003 van Tiel, Bob, Elizabeth Pankratz & Chao Sun. 2019b. Scales and scalarity: Processing scalar inferences. Journal of Memory and Language 105. 427–441. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2018.12.002 van Tiel, Bob, Elizabeth Pankratz, Paul Marty & Chao Sun. 2019a. Scalar inferences and cognitive load. In M. Teresa Espinal, E. Castroviejo, M. Leonetti, L. McNally & C. Real-Puigdollers (eds.), Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 23, 429–443. Bellaterra, Spain: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. van Tiel, Bob, Emiel van Miltenburg, Natalia Zevakhina & Bart Geurts. 2016. Scalar diversity. Journal of Semantics 33. 107–135. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffu017 van Tiel, Bob, Michael Franke & Uli Sauerland. 2021. Probabilistic pragmatics explains gradience and focality in natural language quantification. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United State of America 118. e200545311. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2005453118 van Tiel, Bob & Walter Schaeken. 2016. Processing conversational implicatures: Alternatives and counterfactual reasoning. Cognitive Science 41. 1–36. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12362 ↗
61. Wason, P. C. 1959. The processing of positive and negative information. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 11. 92–107. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/17470215908416296 ↗
62. Wason, P. C. 1965. The contexts of plausible denial. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 4. 7–11. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-5371(65)80060-3 ↗
63. Wason, P. C. 1972. In real life negatives are false. Logique et Analyse 15. 17–38. find
64. Westera, Matthijs. 2017. Exhaustivity and intonation: A unified theory: University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands dissertation. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics DOI: 10.5334/gjgl.1457 ↗
65. TO CITE THIS ARTICLE: van Tiel, Bob and Elizabeth Pankratz. 2021. Adjectival polarity and the processing of scalar inferences. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 6(1): 32. 1–21. DOI: https:// doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.1457 ↗ our card
66. Submitted: 02 October 2020 Accepted: 07 February 2021 Published: 31 March 2021 find
67. COPYRIGHT: © 2021 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Ubiquity Press. ↗

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/tiel-2021-adjectival-polarity-processing-scalar-inferences/