Journal article
Accounting for graded structure in adjective categories with valence-based opposition relationships
S De Deyne, W Voorspoels, S Verheyen, DJ Navarro, G Storms
Language Cognition and Neuroscience | ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD | Published : 2014
Abstract
In contrast to noun categories, little is known about the graded structure of adjective categories. In this study, we investigated whether adjective categories show a similar graded structure and what determines this structure. The results show that adjective categories like nouns exhibit a reliable graded structure. Similar to nouns, we investigated whether similarity is the main determinant of the graded structure. We derived a low-dimensional similarity representation for adjective categories and found that valence differences in adjectives constitute an important organising principle in this similarity space. Valence was not implicated in the categories’ graded structure, however. A form..
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Awarded by Australian Research Council
Funding Acknowledgements
This work was supported by research grants awarded by the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO) to the first three authors and by the interdisciplinary research project IDO/07/002 awarded to Dirk Speelman, Dirk Geeraerts and Gert Storms. Dan Navarro was supported by an Australian Research Fellowship (ARC grant DP0773794). We also wish to express our gratitude for the helpful comments by Amy Perfors, Brendan Weekes and two anonymous reviewers. An earlier version of this work was published as De Deyne, Voorspoels, Verheyen, Navarro, and Storms (2011). Comments may be sent to the author at simon.dedeyne@ppw.kuleuven.be.