Abstract
In this chapter the authors present an experimental study conducted with Italian children from Grade 1 to Grade 5 of elementary school (age 6–10) in which they assess children’s performance with sentences containing the focus operators also and only. Beyond the rich acquisition literature on presupposition, the authors aimed at contributing by taking into account children’s performance in the two layers of meaning associated with these focus operators, that is, the prejacent and the alternatives evoked. Also, they aimed at testing the interaction of these operators with negation, in order to evaluate children’s performance with respect to the operations required on the alternatives, that is, from contrasting cases of exclusion in which the alternatives are negated, to cases of addition in which the alternatives are identified as lively options. The authors found a clear developmental trend in children’s performance and also interesting differences between the aspects involved in the computation of presupposed meaning, such as the status of the prejacent (which is claimed to differ in the two particles tested) and the processing of the alternatives evoked (which might be more costly in the case of addition than exclusion).
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Notes
- 1.
The exact percentages of rewards in the condition “no particle” of Experiment 1 were not reported in the article.
- 2.
Please note that in this example, and in all the test sentences with a pre-object focus particle, the direct object is preceded by a definite description. This is done to avoid a possible ambiguity deriving from the fact that in Italian the indefinite determiner uno/a is the same as the numeral one. In order to avoid a reading in which the exclusive particle refers to the numeral itself (“Fabio put only one apple, not two”), we opted for a definite article on the object.
- 3.
We decided to test both sentences because our informants all agreed that the meaning was the same, but some preferred one version and some the other.
- 4.
Recall that, in our experimental design, only two alternatives on the subject and object were presented each time. This rendered the ambiguity—that we alluded to in the text—between a universal or an existential meaning of anche under negation vacuous: in a context in which only two alternatives are present, in fact, there’s no difference between the negative universal reading (no-one, nothing) or the negative existential one (someone else did not—something else was not), both being realized by the same individual/object.
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Foppolo, F., Panzeri, F. (2017). Presuppositions Are Challenging Not Only for Pre-Schoolers, but Also for School-Aged Children. In: Pistoia-Reda, S., Domaneschi, F. (eds) Linguistic and Psycholinguistic Approaches on Implicatures and Presuppositions. Palgrave Studies in Pragmatics, Language and Cognition. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50696-8_6
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