Meaning and Context in Children's Understanding of Gradable Adjectives

Kristen Syrett, Christopher Kennedy, Jeffrey Lidz

Children as young as three years of age and adults distinguish between three types of gradable adjective (GA) meanings --- relative, absolute maximal, and absolute minimal --- based on the role of the context in setting the standard of comparison. Results lend support to a typology of GAs determined by differences in scalar structure. While relative GAs such as big depend on the context for the standard of comparison, absolute GAs (e.g., full, spotted) do not. Evidence comes from a pragmatically-oriented task in which we exploit participants' awareness of the existence and uniqueness presuppositions of definite descriptions to highlight differences among GAs, seen in their willingness to accommodate when the presuppositions are violated. Reaction time analysis of children's non-adult-like acceptance of infelicitous requests with maximal standard GAs reflects an allowance of imprecision that we argue is pragmatic in nature, and therefore distinct from the vagueness encoded in the semantic representations of relative GAs.