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9 results

  • 15 - Judgments of Acceptability, Truth, and Felicity in Child Language

  • from Part III - Experimental Studies of Specific Populations and Language Families
  • Edited by Grant Goodall, University of California, San Diego
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Syntax
    Published online:
    16 December 2021
    Print publication:
    09 December 2021, pp 394-420

  • Summary

    Researchers who study child language have a range of tasks available to them for assessing children’s linguistic knowledge and development.Research findings have shown that sentence acceptability tasks are extremely challenging for children younger than 6 years of age. Pre-school children who are ”metalinguistically aware” can succeed, but most children require the addition of contextual support to demonstrate the intended meaning of the sentence. Instead, many experiments opt for truth-value judgment tasks which can be used successfully with children as young as 3 years old. Truth-value judgment tasks can also incorporate a check on children’s interpretation of the test sentence. Two new tasks, the felicity judgment task and the ternary judgment task, have evolved recently to assess children’s pragmatic inferences. The efficacy of the ternary judgment task has not yet been demonstrated but the felicity judgment task has been used reliably, and can reveal the source of children’s decisions, by presenting explicit alternatives as the basis of the child’s decision.

  • The interpretation of logical connectives in Turkish

  • VASFİYE GEÇKİN, STEPHEN CRAIN, ROSALIND THORNTON
  • Journal:
    Journal of Child Language / Volume 43 / Issue 4 / July 2016
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    29 June 2015, pp. 784-810

  • This study investigated how Turkish-speaking children and adults interpret negative sentences with disjunction (English or) and ones with conjunction (English and). The goal was to see whether Turkish-speaking children and adults assigned the same interpretation to both kinds of sentences and, if not, to determine the source of the differences. Turkish-speaking children and adults were found to assign different interpretations to negative sentences with disjunction just in case the nouns in the disjunction phrase were marked with accusative case. For children, negation took scope over disjunction regardless of case marking, whereas, for adults, disjunction took scope over negation if the disjunctive phrases were case marked. Both groups assigned the same interpretation to negative sentences with conjunction; both case-marked and non-case-marked conjunction phrases took scope over negation. The findings are taken as evidence for a ‘subset’ principle of language learnability that dictates children's initial scope assignments.

  • 25 - Parameters: the pluses and the minuses

  • from Part VI - Syntax and the external interfaces
  • Edited by Marcel den Dikken, City University of New York
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax
    Published online:
    05 August 2013
    Print publication:
    25 July 2013, pp 927-970

  • Summary

    A universal property of natural language is that every language is able to express negation, i.e., every language has some device at its disposal to reverse the truth value of the propositional content of a sentence. The syntax of negation is indissolubly connected to the phenomenon of (negative) polarity. The second section of this chapter deals with the syntax of negative markers, and the third section deals with the syntax and semantics of (negative) polarity items. The chapter focuses specifically on negative concord (i.e., the phenomenon where multiple instances of morphosyntactic negation yield only one semantic negation), with special emphasis on the ambivalent nature of n-words. The various studies of the syntactic properties of negative markers (most notably Zanuttini's analyses of negative markers in Romance varieties) led to a much better understanding of what constrains the cross-linguistic variation that languages exhibit with respect to the expression of sentential negation.

  • Sentential negation in early child English1

  • ROSALIND THORNTON, GRACIELA TESAN
  • Journal:
    Journal of Linguistics / Volume 49 / Issue 2 / July 2013
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    17 December 2012, pp. 367-411
    Print publication:
    July 2013

  • Starting with the seminal work of Klima & Bellugi (1966) and Bellugi (1967), young English-speaking children have been observed to pass through a stage at which their negative utterances differ from those of adults. Children initially use not or no, whereas adults use negative auxiliary verbs (don't, can't, etc.). To explain the observed mismatches between child and adult language, the present study adopts Zeijlstra's (2004, 2007, 2008a, b) Negative Concord Parameter, which divides languages according to whether they interpret negation directly in the semantics with an adverb, or license it in the syntactic component, in which case the negative marker is a head and the language is a negative concord language. Our proposal is that children first hypothesize that negation is expressed with an adverb, in keeping with the more economical parameter value. Because English is exceptional in having both an adverb and a head form of negation, children must also add a negative head (i.e. n't) to their grammar. This takes considerable time as the positive input that triggers syntactic negation and negative concord is absent in the input for standard English, and children must find alternative evidence. The Negative Concord Parameter accounts for an intricate longitudinal pattern of development in child English, as non-adult structures are eliminated and a new range of structures are licensed by the grammar.