Determining and Numerating Adjectives in Children's Speech
John B. Carroll · Child Development · 1939
The difficulty in scientifically attacking the basic aspects of the linguistic behavior of the child has forced investigators to concern themselves largely with extrinsic determinants and concomitants of speech development, such as intelligence, sex, home environment, and sibling status; and with the more obvious and readily measurable intrinsic characteristics of speech, such as vocabulary growth and sentence length.The analysis of basic grammatical processes must, however, be made before such higher-order phenomena as sentence length can be adequately understood.Although a number of studies have been published on sentence structure, sentence length, and degree of grammatical complexity, the present analysis is one of the first to investigate the development of a specific set of grammatical phenomenanamely, the use of determining and numerating adjectives with substantives.It attempts 1) to ascertain whether there are significant trends in the frequency of such words, and in which directions these trends lie; and 2) to describe grammatical development in terms of these trends.The rules for the use of determiners and numeratives are stated by Bloomfield (1, pp.202-6).The following outline will help to clarify these rules as well as Bloomfield's classification of adjectives: BLOOMFIELD'S CLASSIFICATION OF ADJECTIVES ADJECTIVE EXPRESSION: Class meaning: "character of specimens of a species of objects." A. Descriptive adjectives: Class meaning: "qualitative character of specimens;" e.g., blue, soft, tall.B. Limiting adjectives: Class meaning: something like "variable character of specimens."i. Determiners: Class meaning: "identificational character of specimens."(The class is defined by the fact that certain types of nouns are always accompanied by determiners).a. Definite: Class meaning: "identified specimens."Consists of: Possessive adjectives; this, these, that, those, the.b.Indefinite: Class meaning: "unidentified specimens."Consists of: a (anf, any, each, either, every, neither, no, one, some, what, whatever, which, whichever, many a, such a, what a. 2. Numeratives: Class meaning: "quantified specimens."Consists of: all, both, few, same, very, one, much, more, less, and others.NOUNS AND THEIR DETERMINERS I. NAMES (PROPER NOUNS): These take no determiner, are always in the definite category (in the sense defined above), and do not have a plural.II.COMMON NOUNS: Class meaning: "species of object occurring in more than one specimen."A. Bounded Nouns.Class meaning: "species of object occurring in more than one specimen, such that the specimens cannot be subdivided or merged."Singular Plural Definite: (determiner ... determiner