Meaning and Context in Children's Understanding of Gradable Adjectives

Abstract

This paper explores what children and adults know about three specific ways that meaning and context interact: the interpretation of expressions whose extensions vary in different contexts (semantic context dependence); conditions on the felicitous use of expressions in a discourse context (presupposition accommodation) and informative uses of expressions in contexts in which they strictly speaking do not apply (imprecision). The empirical focus is the use of unmodified (positive form) gradable adjectives (GAs) in definite descriptions to distinguish between two objects that differ in the degree to which they possess the property named by the adjective. We show that by 3 years of age, children are sensitive to all three varieties of contextmeaning interaction and that their knowledge of this relation with the definite description is appropriately guided by the semantic representations of the GA appearing in it. These findings suggest that children's semantic representations of the GAs we investigated and the definite determiner the are adult-like and that they are aware of the consequences of these representations when relating meaning and context. Bolstered by adult participant responses, this work provides important experimental support for theoretical claims regarding the semantics of gradable predicates and the nature of different types of 'interpretive variability', specifically semantic context dependence v. pragmatic tolerance of imprecision.

Scale structure: Processing minimum standard and maximum standard scalar adjectives

“…However, there was also a consistency effect: adjectives were verified faster when they satisfied the property of the adjective given an anthropomorphic standard (e.g., a tree would be tall if compared to the height of a human) than if they didn't (e.g., a flower would not be tall if compared to the height of a human). This result bolsters the claim that the scale structure is different for absolute vs. relative adjectives (see also Syrett, Bradley, Kennedy & Lidz, 2005, for evidence from acquisition).…”

Once again on norms and comparison classes

“…Context-dependence. Most authors maintaining the division of gradable adjectives into relative and absolute consider context-dependence of a reference point as a basic criterion for distinguishing between the two groups of adjectival words (Kamp and Partee 1995;Katz 1972;Kennedy 2007;Kennedy and McNally 2005;Lehrer and Lehrer 1982;Nelson and Benedict 1974;Partee 1995Partee , 2007Rips and Turnbull 1980;Rotstein and Winter 2004;Sapir 1944;Syrett 2007;Syrett et al 2010;Vendler 1968). Absolute gradable adjectives, it is argued, are interpreted vis-à-vis a context-independent standard of comparison.…”

Unlikely Imperfectives

“…Thus, Ruth was swimming across the Atlantic is true only if the degree d to which Ruth has traversed the Atlantic is greater than some contextually 6 More evidence for the distinction between relative and absolute adjectives comes from definite descriptions. As Syrett, Kennedy & Lidz (2010) point out, when a subject is presented with two cups of varying heights, the request pass me the tall one is felicitous. However, when a subject is presented with two cups with varying amounts of liquid in them, the request pass me the empty one is infelicitous.…”