Reuter, Kevin and Baumgartner, Lucien and Willemsen, Pascale
(2022)
Tracing Thick and Thin Concepts Through Corpora.
[Preprint]
Abstract
Philosophers and linguists currently lack the means to reliably identify evaluative concepts and to measure their evaluative intensity. Using a corpus-based approach, we present a new method to distinguish evaluatively thick adjectives like 'courageous' from descriptive adjectives like 'narrow', and from value-associated adjectives like 'sunny'. Our study reveals that the modifiers 'truly' and 'really' frequently highlight the evaluative dimension of thick and thin adjectives, allowing for them to be uniquely classified. Based on these results, we believe the operationalization we suggest may pave the way for a more quantitative approach to the study of thick and thin concepts.
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