When assessing the quality of objects, we often choose to use expressions that convey a mildly positive degree of appreciation. This is illustrated, for instance, by the use of adjectives such as decent, acceptable, or ok to describe a pizza (in (1)). In virtue of their mildness, these adjectives contrast with expressions that are normally used to express stronger appreciation — e.g., good or great in (2).
(1) This pizza is decent/acceptable/ok. Mild assessment
(2) This pizza is good/great. Strong assessment
Beyond this intuitive difference, mild adjectives feature a cluster of grammatical properties that set them apart from their stronger counterparts. Among others: (i) they resist embedding in degree constructions (?more decent; ??okayest vs. ✓ better, greatest); (ii) they have contradictory antonyms (#neither acceptable nor unacceptable vs. ✓neither good nor bad); (iii) they can modified by barely (✓barely ok/acceptable vs. #barely good/great); (iv) and they can be used to express modal, non-evaluative across different types of modality (an acceptable form of ID; a decent person).
Taken together, these patterns indicate that the meaning of mild adjectives must be encoded in a fundamentally different way from that of their stronger counterparts — and therefore that there is more to the distinction between these two types of predicates than their intuitive difference in intensity. Accordingly, I suggest that mild adjectives can be thought of as encoding a modal component. Specifically, they require that an object’s value exceeds a necessity standard – the minimum value that makes it possible for an object to fulfill its purpose. This analysis highlights mild adjectives as a domain of predication in which gradability, modality and scalar reasoning closely interact, opening up a novel perspective on how different semantic components work together to allow speakers to express qualitative judgments.