Adverbs as Multipliers: Simplification and Extension
Donald W. Stilson, Robert J. Maroney · The American Journal of Psychology · 1966
Cliff has described a multiplicative rule for the combination of intensive adverbs (e.g. very, slightly) and evaluative adjectives (e.g. good, bad).1 This rule has been verified, and it is of considerable interest in terms of what Osgood and Sebeok have called the laws of word-mixture.2 The scaling methods used by Cliff require formidable calculations and this might be expected to deter others from attempting to apply and extend his results. In connection with the possibility of using simplified scaling, Cliff remarks that some method such as assigning values by simply averaging the ratings given by the subjects would not generally be satisfactory in deriving the equivalent of a comparative judgments-scale. It would be so only if successive interval scaling would result in intervals of equal size.4 In spite of the fact that intervals of unequal size were found by Cliff, we are reporting an attempt to verify and extend the multiplicative rule for adverb-adjective mixture using mean ratings.