Cognitive Reference Points. Semantics Beyond the Prototypes in Adjectives of Space and Colour

Psychologists have shown that reference-point reasoning is a ubiquitous cognitive phenomenon intrinsic to perception, categorisation, spatial orientation, social, organisational and marketing behaviour of human beings. Various cognitive tasks involve evoking a salient entity – called cognitive reference point – for establishing mental contact with less salient items. It is then reasonable to assume that language use also involves a lot of reference-point reasoning. However, linguistic aspects of this phenomenon have hardly been investigated. A welcome exception is Langacker’s reference-point model dealing with grammatical constructions and metonymy. This thesis elaborates the reference-point model by applying it to lexical semantics. The only reference point that has been quite intensely studied in lexical semantics is a prototype. By focusing on two adjectival groups (colour and size), the author demonstrates that a whole panoply of cognitive reference points are used to anchor conceptual specifications of lexical items, prototypes being only a special case of the reference-point mechanism. An important finding is that a word may trigger more than one reference point at a time. For example, dimensional adjectives may be interpreted vis-à-vis an average value, endpoints of the scale, prototypes and dimensions of the human body. Contextual variability is claimed to be related to various combinations of reference points, their relative salience and patterns of interaction.LEI Universiteit LeidenCausaliteit en subjectiviteit in een taalgebruiksbenadering van de grammatica van het Nederland

The role of explicit contrast in adjective acquisition: a cross-linguistic longitudinal study of adjective production in spontaneous child speech and parental input

Experimental studies demonstrate that contrast helps toddlers to extend the meanings of novel adjectives. This study explores whether antonym co-occurrence in spontaneous speech also has an effect on adjective use by the child. The authors studied adjective production in longitudinal speech samples from 16 children (16–36 months) acquiring eight different languages. Adjectives in child speech and child-directed speech were coded as either unrelated or related to a contrastive term in the preceding context. Results show large differences between children in the growth of adjective production. These differences are strongly related to contrast use. High contrast users not only increase adjective use earlier, but also reach a stable level of adjective production in the investigated period. Average or low contrast users increase their adjective production more slowly and do not reach a plateau in the period covered by this study. Initially there is a strong relation between contrast use in child speech and child-directed speech, but this relation diminishes with age. </jats:p

Reference points in linguistic construal: Scalar adjectives revisited

This paper addresses one of the central assumptions in the analysis of scalar adjectives that their positive form is obligatorily interpreted vis-à-vis an average value. By this view, tall and taller than average are equivalent expressions. Counter to this well-established view, I argue that the two constructions are not equivalent; there are important semantic and functional differences between them. First, not all uses of the positive form are interpreted vis-à-vis an average value. Second, even in contexts where the average is relevant, it is not sufficient by itself: several standards of comparison are involved in the interpretation of scalar adjectives. Third, bare scalars and the Aer-than-average construction select different scale parts as their profile and are in this sense different construals of the gradual scale

Adjective semantics, world knowledge and visual context: Comprehension of size terms by two- to seven-year-old Dutch-speaking children

The interpretation of size terms involves constructing contextually-relevant reference points by combining visual cues with knowledge of typical object sizes. This study aims to establish at what age children learn to integrate these two sources of information in the interpretation process and tests comprehension of the Dutch adjectives groot ‘big’ and klein ‘small’ by two- to seven-year-old children. The results demonstrate that there is a gradual increase in the ability to inhibit visual cues and to use world knowledge for interpreting size terms. Two- and three-year-old children only used the extremes of the perceptual range as reference points. From age four onwards children, like adults, used a cut-off point in the mid-zone of a series. From age five on, children were able to integrate world knowledge and perceptual context. Although seven-year-olds could make subtle distinctions between sizes of various object classes, their performance on incongruent items was not yet adult-like

Boundedness and relativity: A contrastive study of English and Russian

It is often assumed that relative adjectives (e.g. ‘long’, ‘old’) evoke unbounded scales and are, therefore, incompatible with maximizers (e.g. ‘completely’) and approximators (e.g. ‘almost’). In contrast, absolute adjectives which are felicitous with maximizers (e.g. ‘completely full’) and approximators (e.g. ‘almost full’) are argued to trigger bounded scales. This paper investigates whether the semantic typology of gradable adjectives developed for Germanic languages can be extended to non-Germanic languages by comparing the distribution of relative adjectives with totality modifiers in English and Russian corpora. In line with the previous research, the corpus analysis shows that English relative adjectives are associated with fully unbounded scales and are very infrequent in combination with maximizers and approximators. In contrast, Russian relative adjectives evoke half-bounded scales. Therefore, relative adjectives denoting less of a property (e.g. korotkij “short”, dešëvyj “cheap”) are quite frequently modified by maximizing adverbs in Russian. However, unlike maximum-standard absolute adjectives, Russian relative adjectives are incompatible with approximators. It is concluded that there is no universal one-to-one relationship between adjective types and scale types