Semantics in Acquisition

366 Pages·2006·3.5 MB·English

by  Greg Carlson Ph.D.Diss. (auth.)

SEMANTICS IN ACQUISITION
STUDIES IN THEORETICALPSYCHOLINGUISTICS
VOLUME 35
Managing Editors
Lyn Frazier, Dept. of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Thomas Roeper, Dept. of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Kenneth Wexler, Dept. of Brain and Cognitive Science, MIT, Cambridge, Mass.
Editorial Board
Robert Berwick, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT, Cambridge, Mass.
Matthew Cocker, Saarland University, Germany
Janet Dean Fodor, City University of New York, New York
Angela Friederici, Max Planck Institute of Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Germany
Merrill Garrett, University of Arizona, Tucson
Lila Gleitman, School of Education, University of Pennsylvania
Chris Kennedy, Northwestern University, Illinois
Manfred Krifka, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany
Howard Lasnik, University of Connecticut at Storrs
Yukio Otsu, Keio University, Tokyo
Andrew Radford, University of Essex, U.K.
The titles published in this series are listed at the end of this volume.
SEMANTICS IN
ACQUISITION
Edited by
VEERLE VAN GEENHOVEN
Radboud Universiteit, Nijmegen,
The Netherlands
AC.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN-10 1-4020-4484-4 (HB)
ISBN-13 978-1-4020-4484-7 (HB)
ISBN-10 1-4020-4485-2 (e-book)
ISBN-13 978-1-4020-4485-4 (e-book)
Published by Springer,
P.O. Box 17, 3300 AADordrecht, The Netherlands.
www.springer.com
Printed on acid-free paper
All Rights Reserved
© 2006 Springer
No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming,
recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the
exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered
and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.
Printed in the Netherlands.
to my late husband Bernd
CONTENTS

ACQUISITION AND INTERPRETATION: A BRIEF INTRODUCTION 1
Veerle Van Geenhoven

PART I: THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SYNTAX-SEMANTICS
INTERFACE

‘MISMATCHES’ OF FORM AND INTERPRETATION 19
Greg Carlson

WATCHING NOUN PHRASES EMERGE: SEEKING COMPOSITIONALITY 37
Tom Roeper

CROSS-LINGUISTIC ACQUISITION OF COMPLEMENT TENSE 65
Ayumi Matsuo

PART II: ACQUIRING UNIVERSAL QUANTIFICATION

EVERYBODY KNOWS 89
Luisa Meroni, Andrea Gualmini, and Stephen Crain

THE EFFECT OF CONTEXT ON CHILDREN’S INTERPRETATIONS
OF UNIVERSALLY QUANTIFIED SENTENCES 115
Kenneth F. Drozd and Erik van Loosbroek

STRUCTURE AND MEANING IN THE ACQUISITION OF SCOPE 141
Julien Musolino

PART III: TIME IN THE LANGUAGE OF A LEARNER

TIME FOR CHILDREN: AN INTEGRATED STAGE MODEL OF ASPECT
AND TENSE 167
Veerle Van Geenhoven
CONTENTS viii
STATE CHANGE AND TEMPORAL REFERENCE IN INUKTITUT
CHILD LANGUAGE 193
Mary Swift

TEMPORAL ADVERBIALS AND EARLY TENSE AND ASPECT MARKERS
IN THE ACQUISITION OF DUTCH 219
Marianne Starren

PART IV: FINITENESS AND ITS DEVELOPMENT

ON FINITENESS 245
Wolfgang Klein

FUNCTIONS OF FINITENESS IN CHILD LANGUAGE 273
Petra Gretsch

PART V: FOCUS PARTICLES IN CHILD LANGUAGE

ADDITIVE PARTICLES AND SCOPE MARKING IN CHILD GERMAN 303
Ulrike Nederstigt

(UN)STRESSED OOK IN CHILD DUTCH 329
Wenda Bergsma

SUBJECT INDEX 349
VEERLE VAN GEENHOVEN
ACQUISITION AND INTERPRETATION
A Brief Introduction
Abstract. By raising a number of general questions as well as some of the specific questions
addressed in the contributed papers, this introductory chapter shows the need for semantic
thinking in language acquisition studies. I illustrate how insights in semantics can be related to
findings and questions about language acquisition and how they can support particular solutions
to puzzles in learners’ data. I also illustrate the opposite case, namely, that semantic theories can
broaden their empirical horizon by taking acquisition data into account.
1. SOME THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES
By shifting the perspective in language acquisition research towards a
semantic one, the present volume wants to show how acquisition research can
gain from semantic research. The volume thus lays a basis for future
investigations in the domain of the acquisition of semantic phenomena and
interpretive skills, a field that so far has received little systematic attention
within language acquisition research. This shift in perspective automatically
leads to the additional insight that acquisition data can be a challenge for
existing semantic theories. Investigating the semantics of acquisition data is
an area that so far has been largely ignored by semanticists. Hence, by
reconciling acquisition work with semantics work and by reconsidering ‘old’
findings about the language of a learner from a semantic perspective the book
will be of interest to researchers studying language acquisition, to linguists
interested in semantics and its interface with (morpho)syntax, and to cognitive
psychologists who work on language interpretation.
In this introductory chapter, I first discuss some phenomena that trigger
the general need for shifting the perspective on language data from a
syntactic to a semantic one. Next, I point out how this shift is a prerequisite
for our understanding of the development of the close interaction of structure
and meaning that we find in natural language, an interaction which is known
as the ‘syntax-semantics interface’. A third issue I address is the issue of
crosslinguistic variation, both in structure and meaning. Related to this, I
discuss the crosslinguistic ‘flavour’ of learner data. The fourth question that
I raise is what acquisitionists can learn from semanticists. For this purpose, I
1
V. Van Geenhoven (ed.), Semantics in Acquisition, 1–18.
© 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.
2 VEERLE VAN GEENHOVEN
relate the semantic interpretation of adult focus to a number of questions
about child focus. In the fifth subsection, I address the opposite question:
Can, and if so, what do semanticists learn from acquisition theories and the
data that support them? In the final subsection, I discuss some methodo-
logical aspects related to collecting and semantically interpreting child data in
a reliable way.
1.1. From a Syntactic towards a Semantic Perspective
Due to the central role that the innateness hypothesis plays in Chomskyan
approaches to syntax and, hence, in the syntactic theory of Universal
Grammar, the formal study of language acquisition is characterized by a
strong bias towards constituent structure and other aspects of language
structure. As a consequence, formal acquisition studies have primarily
contributed supporting evidence for or against particular answers to questions
about natural language syntax. However, many phenomena and puzzles in
natural language and hence also in the ‘incomplete’ language of a learner
cannot be syntactically accounted for. Consider (1), a sentence that contains a
universally quantified subject (all candidates) and a negation (not) in the VP:
(1) All candidates did not pass the exam.
Ladd (1980) observed that a fall-rise intonation makes us understand this
sentence that some but not all members of a contextually known set of
candidates passed the exam. A simple falling contour gives rise to another
reading, namely, one in which none of the candidates passed the exam. On
the former interpretation, the negation has scope over the quantifier whereas
on the latter the quantifier has scope over the negation. Interestingly, in
German we find the same ambiguity corresponding to two intonational
patterns (see Geurts, 1996):
(2) Alle Kandidaten haben das Examen nicht bestanden.
all candidates have the exam not passed
The normal declarative intonation pattern yields the reading in which none of
the candidates was successful. With stress on alle (‘all’) and nicht (‘not’), the
sentence is understood in such a way that some but not all candidates out of a
presupposed set of candidates passed the exam.
This observation about an interpretive similarity between the English
example (1) and its German correspondent (2) gives rise to a number of
questions. First, what is the nature of this similarity? Should it be attributed
to similarities in these languages’ syntactic components, or to similarities in