{"pk":24223,"title":"Is the asymmetry in negative strengthening the result of adjectival polarity or face considerations?","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Sentences with negated adjectives receive a stronger interpretation than given by their semantics, a phenomenon called negative strengthening. It has been reported that inherently positive adjectives display a higher degree of negative strengthening than inherently negative adjectives. We investigate two possible causes of this asymmetry: intrinsic adjectival polarity and face considerations. Results of an experiment where face-related factors were manipulated suggest that both polarity and face contribute to the asymmetry. Extending a probabilistic RSA model of polite speech, we formalize the listener's reasoning about a speaker's use of negated adjectives as a tradeoff between expecting a speaker to maximize both an utterance's social and informational utility, while avoiding inherently costly adjectives.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Linguistics; Language understanding; Pragmatics; Bayesian modeling; Computational Modeling; Computer-based experiment; Statistics"}],"section":"Papers with Poster Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8vv324wq","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Sarang","middle_name":"","last_name":"Jeong","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""},{"first_name":"Christopher","middle_name":"","last_name":"Potts","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""},{"first_name":"Judith","middle_name":"","last_name":"Degen","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2024-01-01T13:00:00-05:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/24223/galley/13819/download/"},{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/24223/galley/21323/download/"}]}