Thickness Is More Than Affective Valence: Evaluative Language Through the Lenses of Psycholinguistics.

ABSTRACT: Thick terms like "courageous," "smart," and "tasty" combine description and evaluation, contrasting with purely evaluative terms like "good" and "bad," and descriptive terms like "Italian" and "green." Thick terms intuitively constitute a special class of evaluative language; but we currently do not know whether the psycholinguistic effects of these terms are reducible to known semantic dimensions. Here, we start to systematically explore this question by comparing the behavior of thick terms and non-thick descriptive terms with similar affective valence, which is a strong candidate semantic dimension to account for differences between evaluative and non-evaluative language. We study thick terms from English, Dutch, and Italian, combining behavioral data from the cancellability task, Cloze

SUBMITTER: Cassani G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12862288 | biostudies-literature | 2026 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature