L’acquisizione degli aggettivi. Quello che i bambini ci dicono sul significato degli aggettivi relativi

Abstract

Children as young as two year-olds produce relative adjectives such as big, tall, long, even if their interpretation appears to be complex. In order to judge a particular toy as a big mouse, for instance, one has to first identify the intended standard of comparison (i.e., the mouse is big “as a mouse”, or “compared to another toy”), and then compare the two sizes. Previous studies showed that pre-school aged children exhibit a good performance in experimental settings, being able to correctly identify the intended normative or perceptual standards, even though they also make a consistent series of errors (substitution and extreme labeling). HH Clark suggested that younger children access only the nominal interpretation of relative adjectives, and only at a later stage they switch to the comparative one. I review the main results concerning the process of the acquisition of adjectives, I argue that Clark’s hypothesis can account for the data, and I eventually suggest that the switch from the nominal to the comparative interpretation can also shed some light on the analysis of the meaning of adjectives, and that it is a process that bears some analogy to the computation of implicatures.