Aesthetic adjectives lack uniform behavior
The goal of this short paper is to show that esthetic adjectives—exemplified by “beautiful” and “elegant”—do not pattern stably on a range of linguistic diagnostics that have been used to taxonomize the gradability properties of adjectives. We argue that a plausible explanation for this puzzling dat...
| Autores: | , , |
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| Tipo de recurso: | artículo |
| Estado: | Versión aceptada para publicación |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2016 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Universitat Pompeu Fabra |
| Repositorio: | Repositorio Digital de la UPF |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:repositori.upf.edu:10230/32802 |
| Acceso en línea: | http://hdl.handle.net/10230/32802 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2016.1208927 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Aesthetic adjectives Aesthetic concepts Gradable adjectives Predicates of personal taste Experimental semantics Experimental philosophy Experimental philosophical aesthetics Context Comparison class |
| Sumario: | The goal of this short paper is to show that esthetic adjectives—exemplified by “beautiful” and “elegant”—do not pattern stably on a range of linguistic diagnostics that have been used to taxonomize the gradability properties of adjectives. We argue that a plausible explanation for this puzzling data involves distinguishing two properties of gradable adjectives that have been frequently conflated: whether an adjective’s applicability is sensitive to a comparison class, and whether an adjective’s applicability is context-dependent. |
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