Time-stability and adjective use by child and adult English speakers

Abstract

English is a language with a large, homogeneous class of adjectives. English speakers can choose to use a property term as part of a noun phrase (e.g., 'The big man') or adjectival predicate (e.g., 'He is a big man'). Speech samples from natural interactions between three English-speaking children (Abe, Adam and Sarah included in the CHILDES corpus, MacWhinney 1995) and their caretakers were evaluated for any correspondence between the semantic notion of time-stability and the use of adjectives in either predicate or noun-modifying form. The analysis revealed that these speakers appeared to be guided by the underlying time- stability (Givon 1984) of the concept encoded in the term and utterance when making choices about whether a term was used in a noun phrase or in an adjectival predicate. In particular, more time-stable meanings tended to occur in noun-modifying form, and more time-unstable meanings tended to occur in predicate form. This tendency was examined with regard to Dixon's (1977) semantic types. Both the children and their caretakers evidenced the same general pattern of usage. Implications of the findings for language acquisition and directions for future research are discussed.