TY  - JOUR
A1  - Szendrői, Kriszta
A1  - Schumacher, Rebecca
A1  - Fritzsche, Tom
A1  - Höhle, Barbara
T1  - Acquisition of quantifier raising of a universal across an existential
BT  - Evidence from German
JF  - Glossa : a journal of general linguistics
N2  - Our paper reports an act out task with German 5- and 6-year olds and adults involving doubly-quantified sentences with a universal object and an existential subject. We found that 5- and 6-year olds allow inverse scope in such sentences, while adults do not. Our findings contribute to a growing body of research (e.g. Gualmini et al. 2008; Musolino 2009, etc.) showing that children are more flexible in their scopal considerations than initially proposed by the Isomorphism proposal (Lidz & Musolino 2002; Musolino & Lidz 2006). This result provides support for a theory of German, a “no quantifier raising”-language, in terms of soft violable constraints, or global economy terms (Bobaljik & Wurmbrand 2012), rather than in terms of hard inviolable constraints or rules (Frey 1993). Finally, the results are compatible with Reinhart’s (2004) hypothesis that children do not perform global interface economy considerations due to the increased processing associated with it.
KW  - quantifier raising
KW  - language development
KW  - inverse scope reading
KW  - German language
KW  - interface economy
Y1  - 2017
SN  - 2397-1835
VL  - 2
PB  - Open Library of Humanities
CY  - London
ER  -