Antonymy and Evaluativity

The goal of this paper is to characterize and account for the systematic distribution of a semantic property, “evaluativity”. A construction is evaluative if it makes reference to a degree that exceeds a contextually specified standard. The term comes from Neeleman et al. (2004); Seuren (1978) alternatively refers to this property as ‘orientedness’ and Bierwisch (1989) as ‘norm-relatedness’. The distribution of evaluativity seems to vary with the predicate and quantifier of a degree construction. I attempt to explain this distribution in terms of semantic properties of predicates and degree quantifiers. Evaluativity is typically associated with positive constructions as in (1):

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