Meaning and Context in Gradable Adjectives i Meaning and Context in Children’s Understanding of Gradable Adjectives

This work provides the first experimental evidence that adults and children as young as three years of age distinguish between three types of gradable adjective meanings – relative, absolute maximum standard, and absolute minimum standard – based on the role of the context in setting the standard of comparison. These results lend support to a typology of gradable adjectives determined by abstract differences in scalar structure. While relative gradable adjectives such as big depend on the context for the standard of comparison, absolute gradable adjectives (e.g., full, straight, spotted, bumpy) do not. Evidence comes from a pragmatically-oriented task in which we exploit participants’ awareness of the existence and uniqueness presuppositions associated with definite descriptions and measure their willingness to accommodate when these presuppositions are violated. An analysis of children’s reaction times in their non-adult-like acceptance of a puppet’s infelicitous requests with maximal standard GAs (full, straight) reveals an allowance of imprecision in the degree to which the standard must hold that we argue is pragmatic in nature, and therefore distinct from the vagueness encoded in the semantic representations of relative GAs. Meaning and Context in Gradable Adjectives 1 Meaning and Context in Children’s Understanding of Gradable Adjectives