Roll-Up is too complex for Romanian 5-year-olds: Evidence from recursive adjectives

Aug 24, 2026

The paper investigates how Romanian 5-year-olds comprehend and produce recursive adjective structures, using examples like florile micimari (“the big small flowers”). Based on an experiment with 20 children, results show a strong tendency to reduce recursion to coordination, which is the default strategy at this stage. Children also avoid producing recursive adjective forms, preferring simpler alternatives, and coordinate significantly more often. The findings suggest that Romance multiple adjectives are derived by Roll-Up, unlike recursive prepositional phrase performance.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages11

Reading Time28 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Multiple adjectives and Roll-Up

2021. Proc Ling SocAmer 6(1). 133–143. [https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v6i1.4953](https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v6i1.4953) . Roll-Up is too complex for Romanian 5-year-olds: Evidence from recursive adjectives Adina Camelia Bleotu & Tom Roeper* Abstract. The current paper examines Romanian 5-year-olds’ comprehension and production of recursive structures involving multiple adjectives such asflorile micimari ‘flowers-the small big’, i.e.,“the big small flowers”. On the basis of an experiment we conducted on 20 Romanian 5-year-olds, we show that children have the tendency to reduce recursion to coordination, the default interpretation at this stage of language acquisition. Moreover, children avoid producing recursive structures, preferring simpler forms instead, while they produce coordinative structures to a much higher extent. Since children’s performance with recursive adjectives in Romanian seems to be worse than performance with recursive prepositional phrases (Bleotu 2020), we argue that this supports the idea that, unlike prepositional phrases, multiple adjectives in Romance are derived through the complex operation of Roll-Up (Cinque 1994, 2005, 2010) . Keywords. language acquisition; Romanian L1; adjectives; recursion; coordination; Roll-Up 1. Introduction. Multiple adjective modification has been investigated by many theoretical and language acquisition studies (e.g., Dixon 1982, Matthei 1982, Cinque 1994, 2005, 2010, Scott 2002, Bryant 2006, Scontras et al. 2017, a.o.) . However, most of the literature has focused on Adjective Ordering Restrictions, i.e., orderings of multiple adjectives specifying different dimensions such as the adjective big specifying SIZE and the adjective red specifying COLOR in the big red apples. The literature has dealt to a much lesser extent with multiple adjectives specifying the same dimension such as the adjectives big and small, which both specify SIZE. Our study hopes to shed light on the latter issue through an experiment on the ordering of recursive adjectives (specifying the same dimension, namely SIZE) . To this purpose, we tested how Romanian 5-year-olds comprehend and produce multiple adjective structures involving both recursion and coordination. We show that Romanian children tend to reduce recursion to coordination in the case of adjectives to a larger extent than with other structures (like Prepositional Phrases) or in other languages (like English) . We then examine the results in light of Cinque’s Roll-Up Theory (1994, 2005, 2010), arguing that the acquisition data support the idea that adjectives in Romance are derived through a complex operation (Roll-Up) resulting in the reverse order from English. 2. Multiple adjectives and Roll-Up Most of the research on adjective orderings focuses on adjectives which specify different properties, such as the adjectives in (1) . (1) a beautiful small oval orange French vase * The current work has been supported by the ISDS-UB postdoc project A Coloring Approach to how Children Understand Recursion in Romanian (supervised by Larisa Avram) . We would like to thank the children and tutors at Waldorf Kindergarten (Bucharest) and the students at the University of Bucharest for taking part in the experiment. In addition, we would also like to give thanks to the audiences at UMass, BUCLD, LSA 2021 for their valuable comments and suggestions. Authors: Adina Camelia Bleotu, ISDS, University of Bucharest ([cameliableotu@gmail.com](cameliableotu@gmail.com)) & Tom Roeper, UMass Amherst ([roeper@linguist.umass.edu](roeper@linguist.umass.edu)). © 2021 Author(s) . Published by the LSA with permission of the author(s) under a CC BY license. Various ordering generalizations have been proposed in the literature (see 2): (2) a. VALUE > DIMENSION > PHYSICAL PROPERTY > SPEED > HUMAN PROPENSITY > AGE > COLOR (Dixon 1982) b. SUBJECTIVE COMMENT > SIZE > LENGTH > HEIGHT > SPEED > WIDTH > WEIGHT > TEMPERATURE > AGE > SHAPE > CO

FAQs

What is the main question of the study?

The study asks how Romanian 5-year-olds comprehend and produce multiple adjective structures involving both recursion and coordination, focusing on recursive adjectives that specify the same dimension (SIZE).

What did the experiment with 20 children show?

Children tended to reduce recursion to coordination and showed avoidance of producing recursive adjective structures, preferring simpler forms instead.

How do the authors relate the results to Roll-Up theory?

The authors argue that the acquisition data support the idea that Romance multiple adjectives are derived through a complex Roll-Up operation, yielding an order different from English.

Aug 24, 2026

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