The case study in this chapter deals with the adjective sheer and some of its near-synonyms as given by dictionaries: pure, complete, and absolute.
After a notable increase of the proportion of nouns at an early stage, the proportion of predicates (verbs and adjectives) grew steadily.
In addition, she classified adjectives appearing by themselves as single-word utterances as predicative.
To ensure reliability, 10 % of the adjective utterances from a random sample of transcripts were coded independently by a fourth coder.
Authentic texts also displayed a tendency toward having a higher incidence of adjectives and subordinating conjunctions and prepositions, but these findings only approached significance.
The association is particularly noticeable with the nominalized adjective the elderly.
Even for nouns and adjectives, the grammatical classes with the greatest percentage of citation forms, signers chose cf variants 32% of the time.
It has been unclear, however, whether such synchrony between caregivers and children extends into the realm of adjective acquisition.
