Can Children Tell Us Something about the Semantics of Adjectives?

Abstract

We propose to investigate the process of the acquisition of relative gradable adjectives by children in order to gather new evidence to evaluate the main two theories that have been proposed to account for the meaning of gradable adjectives, i.e. the degree-based analysis and the partial function approach. We claim that younger children start by assigning a nominal like interpretation to relative gradable adjectives (tall means “with a vertical dimension”), and only at a later stage, for informativeness reasons, they access the comparative reading (tall means “taller than a standard”). We present and discuss the results of an experimental study in which we aimed at “turning adults into children”. We show that, when informativeness is not at stake, even adults seem to access the nominal interpretation of relative adjectives. We eventually argue that the transition from the nominal to the comparative reading of relative adjectives is easily accounted for by a partial function approach.