Linguistic tests — particularly those based on judgements about the grammaticality or acceptability of sentences — are among the most widely used data sources in the syntactic and semantic tradition. In this paper, as a case study of the use of a methodology based on such linguistic tests, the evaluative nouns of Spanish are analysed. These constitute a particularly elusive category owing to the diversity of combinatorial behaviours displayed by their members, beyond their shared property of expressing a value judgement. Drawing on the syntactic and semantic properties of these nouns, it is argued that their defining characteristic is that they contribute to the expressive dimension of meaning, and that a typology can be established on the basis of other properties, such as degree, the target of the evaluation, and subjectivity.
Melania S. Masià is a linguist and currently works as a permanent lecturer (profesora titular laboral) at the University of the Balearic Islands. Prior to this, she worked as a computational linguist at Google and as an associate lecturer at the Complutense University of Madrid and the University of Valencia. She holds a degree in Hispanic Philology from the University of Valencia and a PhD in Cognitive Science and Language from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Her research focuses on the meaning of natural language from a formal and experimental perspective. Specifically, she works on evaluative meaning, modification, and the development of referentiality. She is a member of the research groups Bilingualism and Acquisition of Spanish and the Sociolinguistics Research Group of the Balearic Islands.