Aesthetic adjectives lack uniform behavior

摘要

The goal of this short paper is to show that esthetic adjectivesexemplified by beautiful and elegantdo not pattern stably on a range of linguistic diagnostics that have been used to taxonomize the gradability properties of adjectives. We argue that a plausible explanation for this puzzling data involves distinguishing two properties of gradable adjectives that have been frequently conflated: whether an adjective's applicability is sensitive to a comparison class, and whether an adjective's applicability is context-dependent.