The semantic structure of gradable adjectives: an experiment and a Bayesian model
Fausto Carcassi (CLE, University of Edinburgh)
Tuesday, April 23
11:00am – 12:00pm
Room 1.17, DSB
We describe a systematic difference between the semantic structure of nouns and of gradable adjectives in their bare use in terms of Gardenfors’ conceptual spaces theory. We propose that the difference can be explained in terms of a difference in structure of the conceptual spaces underlying nouns and gradable adjectives. We present an experiment to support this proposal. The data did not support the hypothesis. We then present a cognitive Bayesian model of learning that encodes the theoretical proposal, and nest it within a hierarchical Bayesian model to do exploratory analysis.