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.

Context sensitivity and the semantics of count nouns in the evaluation of partial objects by children and adults

“…Finally, the third example comes from investigations of the maximality component of plural definite descriptions, such as the strawberries or the cars. Across tasks, children have been shown to not recognize that a plural definite description picks out all of the elements in the relevant set (Caponigro, Pearl, Brooks & Barner, 2012;Karmiloff-Smith, 1979;Simon-Pearson & Syrett, 2018;Tieu, Križ & Chemla, 2019). This definite linguistic expression should in principle have this function, since the atomic individuals are closed under the sum operation to become a MAXIMAL ELEMENT (Link, 1983).…”

Free relatives in Maltese

“…The observation that plain FRCs can be replaced by definite DP or PP paraphrases is key to the majority of approaches to their semantics (see Jacobson (1995), Caponigro (2003) and Caponigro et al (2012), inter alia, for discussion of the status of plain FRC as definites). We return to further discussion of this point below.…”

Most Preschoolers Don’t Know Most

“…Over the past 40 years, a large body of work has documented how children learn and use quantificational language. These studies have focused, in large part, on the subtle difficulties that children encounter in later quantifier acquisition, including their problems with quantifier scope, pragmatic inference, and exhaustivity (e.g., Brooks & Braine, 1996;Caponigro, Pearl, Brooks, & Barner, 2012;Crain & Thornton, 1998;Drozd & van Loosbroek, 1998;Inhelder & Piaget, 1964;Munn, Miller, & Schmidt, 2008;Papafragou & Musolino, 2003;Philip, 1996). Recently, a number of studies have focused attention specifically on children's learning of the quantifier most as a case study in the relation between language and cognition in development.…”