BRASOVEANU AND RETT IN JL

Adrian Brasoveanu and Jessica Rett (UCLA) have published a paper on “Evaluativity across adjective and construction types” in Journal of Linguistics. An adjectival construction is evaluative iff it conveys that the property associated with the adjective exceeds a relevant threshold. The paper presents the first experimental tests of the scope and nature of evaluativity across adjectival constructions and adjective types. The studies confirm that evaluativity is conditioned by adjective type (relative or absolute, Kennedy & McNally 2005) and is not restricted to the positive construction. However, they also show several new and surprising aspects of evaluativity: that it is perhaps better characterized as a gradable property than a binary one; that the ways in which relative and absolute adjectives differ in their evaluativity vary across construction; and that, contrary to standard intuitions, subjects are willing to attribute evaluativity to the subject position of comparative constructions like Sue is taller than Bill.