An adjectival construction is evaluative if and only if it conveys that the property associated with the adjective exceeds a relevant threshold. The questions of which adjectival constructions are evaluative and why have formed the foundation for semantic theories of these constructions and of adjectives themselves (Klein 1980, von Stechow 1984), although it has been alleged that these theories are based on an incomplete picture of the phenomenon of evaluativity (Bierwisch 1989, Rett 2008a). We present the first experimental tests of the scope and nature of evaluativity across adjectival constructions and adjective types. These studies confirm that evaluativity is conditioned by adjective type (relative or absolute, Kennedy & McNally 2005) and is not restricted to the positive construction. However, they also show several new and surprising aspects of evaluativity: that it is perhaps better characterized as a gradable property than a binary one; that the ways in which relative and absolute adjectives differ in their evaluativity vary across construction; and that, contrary to standard intuitions, subjects are willing to attribute evaluativity to the subject position of comparative constructions likeSue is taller than Bill. We show that this last particularly surprising result reveals a lot about how subjects interpret contextually sensitive constructions, and we discuss its consequences for experimental studies and semantic theories of adjectival evaluativity as well as context-sensitive phenomena more generally.

中文翻译：

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跨形容词和结构类型的评估：一项实验研究

当且仅当它传达与形容词相关的属性超过相关阈值时，形容词结构才是可评价的。哪些形容词构式是评价性的以及为什么这些问题构成了这些构式和形容词本身的语义理论的基础（Klein 1980, von Stechow 1984），尽管有人声称这些理论是基于对该现象的不完整描述评价性（Bierwisch 1989，Rett 2008a）。我们提出了跨形容词结构和形容词类型的评价性范围和性质的第一个实验测试。这些研究证实，评价性受形容词类型（相对或绝对，Kennedy & McNally 2005）的制约，并且不限于正面结构。然而，他们还展示了评估性的几个新的和令人惊讶的方面：它可能比二元属性更好地描述为可分级属性；相对形容词和绝对形容词在评价性上的不同方式因构式而异；并且，与标准直觉相反，主体愿意将评价性归因于比较结构的主体位置，例如苏比比尔高. 我们表明，最后一个特别令人惊讶的结果揭示了受试者如何解释上下文敏感的结构，我们讨论了它对形容词评价的实验研究和语义理论以及更普遍的上下文敏感现象的后果。