Abstract
This chapter concerns the first language acquisition (L1A) of universal quantifiers, i.e. grammatical morphemes like English each, every, all. One of its goals is to examine what the L1A of universal quantification consists in by analyzing the components of this knowledge and considering in each case whether or not its acquisition would present a logical problem for the learner in the absence of innate knowledge. Here attention is focused on two key questions: (i) How does the child acquire knowledge of the logical operation that underlies the core meaning of universal quantifiers, and (ii) How does the child comes to know the linguistic constraints on this operation that shape the actual semantic value and syntactic properties of specific universal quantifiers? Consideration of these issues, together with a brief review of certain key empirical observations, leads to the general conclusion that much of the knowledge of universal quantification must be innately specified and would appear to be fully acquired at a very early age. The second objective of this chapter is to examine critically a much-studied child comprehension error which appears to challenge any innateness hypothesis regarding the L1A of universal quantifiers. The error in question (here called “exhaustive pairing”) is typically found in the comprehension performance of 4- and 5 year-olds, a relatively late age. After reviewing the empirical properties of the error and some accounts of it in the literature, a new account is presented. Some predictions of this proposal are then tested in three truth-value judgment experiments with Dutch children.
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Notes
- 1.
Henceforth the term “UG” will be used to refer to innate knowledge of two hypothetical types: (i) that which only applies to linguistic cognition and (ii) that which applies to both linguistic and nonlinguistic cognition. The existence of the former can be questioned (Chomsky 2004; Tomasello 2003), but it is unclear at this point how the issue can be resolved empirically.
- 2.
- 3.
E.g. English all and every (but not each) presuppose greater-than-two plurality: Tom extended each leg (#every/#all) vs. The cat extended every leg/all its legs (cf. Vendler 1967).
- 4.
One can determine at a glance whether or not a dog is completely wet (taking only salient visible parts to be relevant). In contrast, in order to determine whether or not every dog is wet, one must be able to individually check each member of a contextually relevant set of dogs.
- 5.
(9b) is necessarily true, since in some imaginary world a dog is licking a cat; (8b) is necessarily false, since even in the actual world some dogs are not licking a cat. Conservativity helps police the informativeness of language by ruling out pointless assertions of this sort.
- 6.
All in a sentence like The dog licked them all and each in (1d) (cf. Safir and Stowell 1987) are two additional types of NP-local universal quantifier (both very marked in English).
- 7.
The child must also learn that some quantifiers, e.g. English each and every, can only quantify over objects, but this appears to be an idiosyncratic lexical property since the constraint does not apply to all (recall 2b-c above) nor to numeral quantifiers denoting large numbers: Four thousand ships have passed through this lock can also be true if, say, only 1,000 ships passing through the lock but did so on 4,000 different occasions (Krifka 1990).
- 8.
Unselectively binding both the object and the subject NP would yield such a meaning:
∀x,y(x∈dog & y∈cat) ∃e[lick(x,y,e)], e ranging over minimal events (cf. Heim 1982).
- 9.
In a connectionist model, disuse of an incorrectly hypothesized grammatical option progressively weakens the weights of the connections supporting this option until it eventually completely disappears. In the Optimality-Theoretical L1A model of Tesar and Smolensky (1998), in addition to the corrective effect of positive evidence, the failure to observe an initially hypothesized option causes a reordering of the ranking of constraints such that the option is excluded.
- 10.
The cited studies all report observations of adults directly correcting false child statements. E.g. while pointing at a car, the child says “That’s a nice house” and the adult replies “It’s not a house, dear; it’s a car.” While it is well-established that negative evidence plays no significant role in the L1A of grammatical form (e.g. Morgan and Travis 1989; Marcus 1993), the possible role of negative semantic evidence has never been systematically investigated.
- 11.
- 12.
Crain et al. also propose that a TVJ experiment should include satisfaction of a “condition of plausible assent”, i.e. that the child should be shown a context that verifies the test sentence under an adult-grammatical reading. However, this does not apply to the EP error, which is a nonadult-like judgement of falsity, but rather to nonadult-like judgments of truth.
- 13.
This abstracts away from individual variation in the frequency of EP, PR and US errors, which was considerable. The English and Japanese studies, from Philip (1995), generally included more than three trials of each condition. The Dutch, French, Spanish, and Norwegian data come from filler items in the pronoun studies of, respectively, Philip and Coopmans (1996), Hamann and Philip (1997), Baauw and Cuetos (2004), and Hestvik and Philip (1999/2000).
- 14.
The Dutch quantifiers ieder(e) in Experiments I and III and elk(e) in Experiment II are both obligatorily distributive (like English each, Vendler 1967). Unlike every, they do not presuppose a domain of quantification of greater-than-two cardinality; unlike both each and every, they both can have a meaning similar to English free-choice any in certain linguistic contexts (Philip 2002), none of which occur in the Experiments I, II or III. When they are DP-local, ieder(e) and elk(e) must agree in noun class with the NP providing their semantic restriction: e.g. elke jongen, elk meisje vs. *elk jongen, *elke meisje (Booij 2002).
- 15.
E.g. a response like “Wrong, because that is a girl” with the child pointing at a boy.
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Philip, W. (2011). Acquiring Knowledge of Universal Quantification. In: de Villiers, J., Roeper, T. (eds) Handbook of Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 41. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1688-9_10
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