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Acquisition of quantifier raising of a universal across an existential
- 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.
Author details: | Kriszta SzendrőiORCiD, Rebecca Schumacher, Tom FritzscheORCiDGND, Barbara HöhleORCiDGND |
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ISSN: | 2397-1835 |
Title of parent work (English): | Glossa : a journal of general linguistics |
Subtitle (English): | Evidence from German |
Publisher: | Open Library of Humanities |
Place of publishing: | London |
Publication type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Date of first publication: | 2017/05/10 |
Publication year: | 2017 |
Release date: | 2022/06/09 |
Tag: | German language; interface economy; inverse scope reading; language development; quantifier raising |
Volume: | 2 |
Number of pages: | 16 |
Funding institution: | Collaborative Research Center "Information Structure: The Linguistic Means of Structuring Utterances, Sentences and Texts" - German Research Foundation (DFG) [SFB 632] |
Organizational units: | Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Strukturbereich Kognitionswissenschaften / Department Linguistik |
DDC classification: | 4 Sprache / 40 Sprache / 400 Sprache |
Peer review: | Referiert |
License (German): | CC-BY - Namensnennung 4.0 International |