TY  - CHAP
U1  - Buchbeitrag
A1  - Schumacher, Petra B.
A1  - Brandt, Patrick
A1  - Weiland-Breckle, Hanna
ED  - Castroviejo, Elena
ED  - McNally, Louise
ED  - Wiedman Sassoon, Galit
T1  - Online processing of “real” and “fake”: the cost of being too strong
T2  - The semantics of gradability, vagueness, and scale structure
N2  - Strengthening literal meanings of linguistic expressions appears central to communicative success. Weakening on the other hand would appear not to be viable given that literal meaning already grossly underdetermines reality, let alone possibility. We discuss productive weakening in fake-type adjectival modification and present evidence from event-related brain potentials that such weakening has neurophysiological consequences and is qualitatively different from other mechanisms of modification. Specifically, the processing of fake-type constructions (e.g., "a fake diamond") evokes a Late Positivity as characteristic of certain types of referential shift or reconceptualization. We argue that fake-type composition involves an intermediate representation that is semantically contradictory and that the Late Positivity reflects an interface repair mechanism that redresses the contradiction. In contrast, composition involving reputedly over-informative real-type adjectives evokes no comparable processing costs.
KW  - contradiction
KW  - repair
KW  - weakeniing
KW  - inference
KW  - privative adjectives comprehension
KW  - ERP
KW  - late positivity
Y1  - 2018
SN  - 978-3-319-77790-0
SB  - 978-3-319-77790-0
SP  - 93
EP  - 111
PB  - Springer
CY  - Cham
ER  -