Adjectives and Negation: deriving Contrariety from Contradiction
Year: 2018
Type: article
Abstract: Antonymic pairs of gradable adjectives (e.g. tall-short) give rise to contrary opposition. This fact has so far stood in the way of reducing this type of opposition to logical negation, which gives rise to contradictory opposition. We present an analysis of these antonymic pairs in terms of an underlying logical negation, and propose to derive the contrary nature of the opposition from the interaction of interval semantics with the presence of a contextual standard, which is known to be a part of the denotation of gradable adjectives. This analysis opens the way for a decomposition of negative adjectives as containing a logical negation with contradictory meaning
Source: Lirias
Authors: De Clercq, Karen, Vanden Wyngaerd, Guido
Institution: KU Leuven
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2625743805