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‘He has too much hard questions’: the acquisition of the linguistic mass–count distinction in much and many

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Virginia C. Gathercole
Virginia C. Gathercole
Affiliation:
Florida International University
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Abstract

Subjects aged 3;6–9;0 were asked to judge sentences in which much and many modified prototypical and non-prototypical mass and count nouns, and to correct those sentences judged to be deviant. The experimental results indicate that children do not approach the co-occurrence conditions of much and many with various nouns from a semantic point of view, but rather from a morphosyntactic or surface-distributional one. Children learn the proper form that the noun must take in these constructions before they learn the proper choice of quantifier. In addition, they reserve many for use with plural count nouns long before they learn that much is restricted in direct noun modification to use with singular mass nouns.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , June 1985 , pp. 395 - 415
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985

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