Language, Individual & Society, Volume 14, 2020

Abstract: This study examines, from a psycholinguistic perspective, the use of adjectives in the narrative discourse of Esperanto speakers from France, Italy and Russia. The informants speak Esperanto at a very advanced level and use the language in their everyday life. Unlike other languages, Esperanto follows the standard founded on grammatical acceptability: any grammatically constructed statement is acceptable. The corpus is composed of two types of stories, each presenting different characteristics: stories based on a series of illustrations Cat Story and stories recounted from the speaker’s personal experience. Adjectives are not absolutely necessary - they provide greater precision to the information being conveyed. Before the age of 15, narrative texts may not contain any adjectives. In adults, the presence of adjectives and their number are related to the degree of elaboration of the statement or narrative. By analyzing the adjectives used in the corpus, I examine their number, their distribution in different types according to their form, and the use of intensifiers. In addition, I examine the place of adjectives – before or after the noun – because Esperanto allows both positions. Speakers whose L1 is respectively French, Italian or Russian focus on different aspects of the situations they perceive and use different strategies to express them. The most striking differences involve, among other things, the use of adjectives, their functions in the narratives and interaction with other word classes (nouns, adverbs and verbs).