Acquiring the meaning of free relative clauses and plural definite descriptions

Abstract

Plural definite descriptions (e.g. the things on the plate) and free relative clauses (e.g. what is on the plate) have been argued to share the same semantic properties, despite their syntactic differences. Specifically, both have been argued to be non-quantificational expressions referring to the maximal element of a given set (e.g. the set of things on the contextually salient plate). We provide experimental support for this semantic analysis with the first reported simultaneous investigation of children's interpretation of both constructions, highlighting how experimental methods can inform semantic theory. A Truth-Value Judgment task and an Act-Out task show that children know that the two constructions differ from quantificational nominals (e.g. all the things on the plate) very early on (4 years old). Children also acquire the adult interpretation of both constructions at the same time, around 6-7 years old. This happens despite major differences in the frequency of these constructions, according to our corpus study of children's linguistic input. We discuss possible causes for this late emergence. We also argue that our experimental findings contribute to the recent theoretical debate on the correct semantic analysis of free relatives.

Alternatives in Semantics

“…Several previous studies have shown that children have significant difficulties with exhaustivity, suggesting that this problem alone could account for all of the Katsos and Bishop results (e.g. Caponigro et al 2012, Roeper et al 2007). Children who are simply not sure whether a nonexhaustive response to a question is correct may offer intermediate rewards, and similarly may fail to outright reject statements as false.…”

Definiteness and Maximality in French Language Acquisition, More Adult-Like Than You Would Expect

“…Suppose that while children may reliably encode existence presuppositions of definites, they may still have specific difficulties with maximality, as has been argued by Wexler (2011, see also discussion below of Caponigro et al, 2012). If this is the case, children tested on this act-out task should show equal difficulties with both plural and singular definites.…”

“…This finding is consistent with the hypothesis that difficulties reside in handling inferences needed for implicit domain restriction, and not with maximality encoding. However, a more recent study (Caponigro et al, 2012) raises worries about Munn et al (2006), suggesting that their data may be understood as reflecting a general bias in the plural conditions toward retrieving all the objects. Caponigro et al correctly observe that inclusion of an indefinite plural control condition in the Munn et al study would enable a demonstration that the response patterns for definite plurals may not have been due to a bias toward ALL responses in plural conditions independent of determiner type.…”

“…Our goal was to adapt the maximality experiment to French and test it on French-speaking children and adults to allow for a better understanding of definiteness interpretation in French. We were interested in studying an age-range across a larger time-span than Munn et al (2006), similar to Karmiloff-Smith (1979) and Caponigro et al (2012), in order to establish whether developmental stages for definiteness comprehension could be observed.…”

The influence of conversational context and the developing lexicon on the calculation of scalar implicatures

“…In addition, whereas a TVJT requires the relevant set(s) to be predetermined in order for participants to render a judgment of a corresponding sentence, an act-out task allows for participants to create these sets themselves (cf. Caponigro et al 2012). Children may have formed contrasting sets of 'whole sets' for todos and 'proper subsets' for algunos (de los), perhaps driving by something like mutual exclusivity (Markman & Wachtel 1988) or the principle of contrast (Clark 1987).…”