Evaluative meaning

Language is rich with evaluative meaning. Why do we say of someone who is very late that they are 'horribly', 'terribly' or 'pretty' late? My view is natural language constantly multitasks, combining objective and subjective information, mixing denotation and connotation. One example of this is what I call the Goldilocks effect, the fact that we tend to use words with negative valence to express extreme things ('Sue is terribly nice') and words with positive valence for milder judgments ('Sue is pretty nice').

I investigate this mixture of various kinds of meanings in single utterances by looking at exclamatives, adverbs of degree, but also figures of speech like hyperbole.

Publications

2026

  1. Hyperbole is not a rational speech act
    Rick Nouwen
    2026
    Under review
    Abs PDF

2024

  1. The semantics and probabilistic pragmatics of deadjectival intensifiers
    Rick Nouwen
    Semantics and Pragmatics, 2024
    DOI

2018

  1. A note on positive and negative evaluative adjectives
    Rick Nouwen
    2018
    Written for a Festschrift for Dany Jaspers

2015

  1. Two types of exclamatives
    Rick Nouwen and Anna Chernilovskaya
    Linguistic Variation, 2015
    PDF

2011

  1. On wh-exclamatives and noteworthiness
    Anna Chernilovskaya and Rick Nouwen
    In Logic, Language and Meaning, 2011
    DOI
  2. Degree modifiers and monotonicity
    Rick Nouwen
    In Vagueness and Language Use, 2011
    PDF

2005

  1. Monotone Amazement
    Rick Nouwen
    In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Amsterdam Colloquium, 2005