Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-29T10:17:26.621Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Children's comprehension of plural predicate conjunction*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 May 2017

LYN TIEU ,
JACOPO ROMOLI ,
EVA POORTMAN ,
YOAD WINTER  and
STEPHEN CRAIN
LYN TIEU*
Affiliation:
Macquarie University, Australia and École Normale Supérieure, France
JACOPO ROMOLI
Affiliation:
Ulster University, UK
EVA POORTMAN
Affiliation:
Utrecht University, Netherlands
YOAD WINTER
Affiliation:
Utrecht University, Netherlands
STEPHEN CRAIN
Affiliation:
Macquarie University, Australia
*
Address for correspondence: Lyn Tieu, Department of Cognitive Science, Australian Hearing Hub, 16 University Avenue, Macquarie University, NSW 2109, Australia. e-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Previous developmental studies of conjunction have focused on the syntax of phrasal and sentential coordination (Lust, 1977; de Villiers, Tager-Flusberg & Hakuta, 1977; Bloom, Lahey, Hood, Lifter & Fiess, 1980, among others). The present study examined the flexibility of children's interpretation of conjunction. Specifically, when two predicates that can apply simultaneously to a single individual are conjoined in the scope of a plural definite (The bears are big and white), conjunction receives a Boolean, intersective interpretation. However, when the conjoined predicates cannot apply simultaneously to an individual (The bears are big and small), conjunction receives a weaker ‘split’ interpretation (Krifka, 1990; Lasersohn, 1995; Winter, 1996). Our experiments reveal that preschool-aged children are sensitive to both intersective and split interpretations, and can use their lexical and world knowledge of the relevant predicates in order to select an appropriate reading.

Type
Brief Research Reports
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , January 2018 , pp. 242 - 259
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[*]

For helpful feedback and discussion, we would like to thank the audience at the 2014 Rencontres d'Automne de Linguistique formelle (RALFe), as well as the linguists at the École Normale Supérieure. We would also like to thank Zheng Shen for his assistance with adult participants, the preschools in Connecticut for allowing us to carry out our study, and Yael Seggev for the original drawing in Figure 1. L. Tieu's research was supported by the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013) / ERC Grant Agreement n.313610, ANR-10-IDEX-0001-02 PSL*, ANR-10-LABX-0087 IEC, and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders (CE110001021); E. Poortman and Y. Winter's work was partially supported by a VICI grant 277-80-002 of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO); and J. Romoli's research was partially supported by the Leverhulme Trust, grant RPG-2016-100 (‘Pluralised mass nouns as a window to linguistic variation’).

References

REFERENCES

Ardery, G. (1980). On coordination in child language. Journal of Child Language 7, 305–20.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bloom, L., Lahey, M., Hood, L., Lifter, K. & Fiess, K. (1980). Complex sentences: acquisition of syntactic connectives and the semantic relations they encode. Journal of Child Language 7, 235–61.Google Scholar
Bowerman, M. (1979). The acquisition of complex sentences. In Garman, M. & Fletcher, P. (eds), Studies in language acquisition. (pp. 285–305). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic structures. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar
Chomsky, N. (1977). Essays on form and interpretation. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Company.Google Scholar
Crain, S., Goro, T., Notley, A. & Zhou, P. (2013). A parametric account of scope in child language. In Stavrakaki, S., Lalioti, M. & Konstantinopoulou, P. (eds), Advances in language acquisition. (pp. 63–71). Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.Google Scholar
Crain, S. & Thornton, R. (1998). Investigations in Universal Grammar: a guide to experiments on the acquisition of syntax and semantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Cromer, R. (1968). The development of temporal references during the acquisition of language. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University.Google Scholar
Dalrymple, M., Kanazawa, M., Kim, Y., Mchombo, S. & Peters, S. (1998). Reciprocal expressions and the concept of reciprocity. Linguistic and Philosophy 21, 159–210.Google Scholar
Dalrymple, M., Kanazawa, M., Mchombo, S. & Peters, S. (1994). What do reciprocals mean? In Harvey, M. & Santelmann, L. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th Semantics and Linguistic Theory Conference. Online: <http://journals.linguisticsociety.org/proceedings/index.php/SALT/issue/view/105>..>Google Scholar
de Villiers, J., Tager-Flusberg, H. & Hakuta, K. (1977). Deciding among theories of the development of coordination in child speech. Stanford Papers and Reports on Child Language Development 13, 118–25.Google Scholar
Dougherty, R. C. (1968). A transformational grammar of coordinate conjoined structures. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Google Scholar
Dougherty, R. C. (1970). A grammar of coordinate conjoined structures, I. Language 46(4), 850–98.Google Scholar
Greenfield, P. M. & Dent, C. H. (1981). Pragmatic factors in children's phrasal coordination. Journal of Child Language 9, 425–43.Google Scholar
Grosu, A. (1979). Review of N. Chomsky, Essays on form and interpretation (New York: North-Holland). Journal of Linguistics 15, 356–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hakuta, K., de Villiers, J. & Tager-Flusberg, H. (1980). Sentence coordination in Japanese and English. Journal of Child Language 9, 193–207.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harries, H. (1973). Coordination reduction. Stanford University Working Papers on Language Universals 11, 139–209.Google Scholar
Hoeksema, J. (1987). The semantics of non-Boolean AND. Journal of Semantics 6, 19–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keenan, E. L. & Faltz, L. M. (1985). Boolean semantics for natural language. Dordrecht: Reidel Publishing Company.Google Scholar
Kerem, N., Friedmann, N. & Winter, Y. (2009). Typicality effects and the logic of reciprocity. In Cormany, E., Ito, S. & Lutz, D. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th Semantics and Linguistic Theory Conference (pp. 257–274). Online: <http://journals.linguisticsociety.org/proceedings/index.php/SALT/issue/view/90>..>Google Scholar
Krifka, M. (1990). Boolean and non-Boolean ‘and’. In Kálmán, L. & Pòlos, L. (eds), Papers from the Second Symposium on Logic and Language, 161–88. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó.Google Scholar
Lakoff, G. & Peters, S. (1969). Phrasal conjunction and symmetric predicates. In Reibel, D. & Schane, S. (eds), Modern Studies in English (pp. 113–142). New York: Prentice-Hall.Google Scholar
Lasersohn, P. (1995). Plurality, conjunction and events. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lust, B. (1977). Conjunction reduction in child language. Journal of Child Language 4, 257–87.Google Scholar
Lust, B. & Mervis, C. A. (1980). Development of coordination in the natural speech of young children. Journal of Child Language 7, 279–304.Google Scholar
Notley, A., Zhou, P. & Crain, S. (2016). Children's interpretation of conjunction in the scope of negation in English and Mandarin: new evidence for the semantic subset maxim. Applied Psycholinguistics 37(4), 867–900.Google Scholar
Paris, S. G. (1973). Comprehension of language connectives and propositional logical relationships. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 16, 278–91.Google Scholar
Partee, B. H. & Rooth, M. (1983). Generalized conjunction and type ambiguity. In Bäuerle, R., Schwarze, C. & von Stechow, A. (eds), Meaning, Use and Interpretation of Language. (pp. 362–383). Berlin: De Gruyter.Google Scholar
Peterson, C. & McCabe, A. (1987). The connective ‘and’: Do older children use it less as they learn other connectives? Journal of Child Language 14, 375–81.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Peterson, C. & McCabe, A. (1988). The connective ‘and’ as discourse glue. First Language 8, 19–28.Google Scholar
Poortman, E. B. (2014). Between intersective and ‘split’ interpretations of predicate conjunction: the role of typicality. In Degen, J., Franke, M. & Goodman, N. (eds), Proceedings of Formal & Experimental Pragmatics 2014. Online: <https://sites.google.com/site/fepesslli2014/proceedings>.Google Scholar
Poortman, E. B. (2017). Concepts and plural predication: the effects of conceptual knowledge on the interpretation of reciprocal and conjunctive plural constructions. Doctoral dissertation, Utrecht University. Utrecht: LOT.Google Scholar
Reitz, S. M. (2013). Context-dependent interpretation of the conjunction und in different age-groups. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität.Google Scholar
Ross, J. (1967). Constraints on variables in syntax. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Google Scholar
Stockwell, R. P., Schachter, P. & Partee, B. H. (1973). The major syntactic structures of English. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc.Google Scholar
Tager-Flusberg, H., de Villiers, J. & Hakuta, K. (1982). The development of sentence coordination. In Kuczaj, S. (ed.), Language development: Vol. 1: syntax and semantics (pp. 201–243). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Williams, E. (1978). Across-the-board rule application. Linguistic Inquiry 9(1), 31–43.Google Scholar
Winter, Y. (1996). A unified semantic treatment of singular NP coordination. Linguistics and Philosophy 19(4), 337–92.Google Scholar
Winter, Y. (2001a). Flexibility principles in Boolean semantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Winter, Y. (2001b). Plural predication and the Strongest Meaning Hypothesis. Journal of Semantics 18(4), 333–365.Google Scholar