Ronderos Camilo R, Aparicio Helena, Long Madeleine, Shukla Vishakha, Jara-Ettinger Julian, Rubio-Fernandez Paula
Department of Philosophy, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway.
Department of Linguistics, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA.
Open Mind (Camb). 2024 Oct 4;8:1213-1227. doi: 10.1162/opmi_a_00165. eCollection 2024.
People derive contrastive inferences when interpreting adjectives (e.g., inferring that 'the short pencil' is being contrasted with a longer one). However, classic eye-tracking studies revealed contrastive inferences with scalar and material adjectives, but not with color adjectives. This was explained as a difference in listeners' informativity expectations, since color adjectives are often used descriptively (hence not warranting a contrastive interpretation). Here we hypothesized that, beyond these pragmatic factors, perceptual factors (i.e., the relative perceptibility of color, material and scalar contrast) and semantic factors (i.e., the difference between gradable and non-gradable properties) also affect the real-time derivation of contrastive inferences. We tested these predictions in three languages with prenominal modification (English, Hindi, and Hungarian) and found that people derive contrastive inferences for color and scalar adjectives, but not for material adjectives. In addition, the processing of scalar adjectives was more context dependent than that of color and material adjectives, confirming that pragmatic, perceptual and semantic factors affect the derivation of contrastive inferences.
人们在解释形容词时会得出对比性推论（例如，推断“短铅笔”是与更长的铅笔形成对比）。然而，经典的眼动追踪研究表明，标量形容词和物质形容词会引发对比性推论，但颜色形容词不会。这被解释为听众信息性期望的差异，因为颜色形容词通常用于描述（因此不需要对比性解释）。在这里，我们假设，除了这些语用因素外，感知因素（即颜色、物质和标量对比的相对可感知性）和语义因素（即可分级属性和不可分级属性之间的差异）也会影响对比性推论的实时推导。我们用三种带有前置修饰语的语言（英语、印地语和匈牙利语）对这些预测进行了测试，发现人们会对颜色形容词和标量形容词得出对比性推论，但对物质形容词则不会。此外，标量形容词的处理比颜色形容词和物质形容词更依赖语境，这证实了语用、感知和语义因素会影响对比性推论的推导。
