Polarity and Comparison at the Interface of Language and Cognition

Tucker, Daniel

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-vp02-m627

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Polarity and Comparison at the Interface of Language and Cognition

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This dissertation investigates the nature of the interface between morphosyntax and cognition. My goal is to connect formal semantic theories of meaning with theories of cognition, drawing on the initial hypothesis that the interface between language and cognition is transparent. I look at different forms of adjectival comparatives -- positive and negative -- and their interplay as a case study for understanding the general mechanisms at work at this interface. Specifically, I leverage formal semantic proposals and the transparency thesis to generate predictions about (i) how long the evaluation of different statements is supposed to take; and (ii) what mechanisms might lead to the differences in the behavioral responses that I observe. This work contributes to our growing understanding of how the nature of the interface might constrain the sorts of structures that occur in natural language. Throughout this dissertation, I use formal semantics as a bridge between linguistic representations (i.e., morphosyntactic objects) and nonlinguistic representations (e.g., representations of line lengths). In thinking about this interface, I posit a close connection (potentially one-to-one) between the atoms of meaning on the linguistic side, and representations and operations on the nonlinguistic side. My case study will be positive and negative adjectives (their antonyms) when they occur in comparative sentences. These cases are interesting because semanticists have posited internal structure to what otherwise appears to be a word, e.g. short equals something like not tall. The operating idea is that formal semantics can provide suggestions about which expressions plausibly invoke transformations on representations, which may induce measurable processing costs. I begin this dissertation by setting out to link a decompositional account of shorter with processing by adopting the hypothesis that each linguistic unit is linked explicitly to a cognitive operation. In two experiments -- a sentence-to-picture verification task and a picture-to-sentence verification task -- I find that shorter comparatives take longer to process than taller comparatives, in line with the decompositional analysis that posits the former as representationally more complex than the latter. Next, I extend this analysis to analytic comparatives with less, and ask whether the behavioral evidence is consistent with decomposition here as well. Importantly, I ask whether there is an additive effect of processing multiple instances of negation in a single comparative statement (e.g. less short). My results suggest that a decompositional analysis of less comparatives is tenable given the behavioral evidence I find. Finally, I extend my psycholinguistic investigation to adjectival comparatives to include consideration of evaluativity, following recent theories on the distribution and interpretation of gradable adjectives that posit silent morphosyntactic elements. My experimental evidence suggests that evaluativity as I operationalized it may capture some of the psychological realia associated with evaluative comparatives, but further research will be necessary to unpack precisely what realia these results correspond to. This dissertation is important for researchers interested in the interface between linguistic and non-linguistic cognition, and more specifically, in the prospects of linking morphosyntactic units to cognitive operations. My emphasis is on the explanatory value that can be gleaned from such a study by positing explicit linking hypotheses between our formal semantic theories and our models of cognitive processing. While my investigation focuses on the representation and processing of gradable adjectival comparatives in English, the methods and analyses I use can be applied more broadly to other constructions and other languages.

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