Context Sensitivity, Vagueness and Gradability in Nominals: Evidence from Child and Adult Language

When does ‘a cup’ not pick out a whole cup? In this research, we pose this simple question to investigate how the categorization of partial objects as representatives of an object kind differs (or does not differ) across development. We start with a curious yet robust observation that young children, when presented with a set of partial and whole objects (like forks) and asked to count or quantify them, appear to treat the partial objects as if they were wholes. This finding, first reported in Shipley & Shepperson (1990), seems to indicate a conceptual shift in development in the treatment of count nouns and their corresponding sortals. We adopt a different perspective, entertaining the possibility that children are doing something that adults might indeed be willing to do in certain instances, and that their response patterns reveal something interesting about the context sensitivity and vagueness inherent in nominals, similar to that seen with gradable adjectives. Across three tasks – a counting task, a presupposition assessment task, and an object referent task – we show that adults and children are more alike than the previous research may have shown, in that members of both age groups both include partial objects and impose limits on their inclusion, in an object category, depending on the speaker’s intentions or contextual goals, and the representation of the object. Thus, we argue there is conceptual and linguistic continuity in this aspect of development, and that experimental data from both children and adults sheds light on the semantics of nominal expressions.