Features. by Greville G. Corbett

ACQUISITION OF STRUCTURE AND INTERPRETATION: CASES FROM MANDARIN BARE AND NON-BARE NOUN PHRASES By Hsiang-Hua Chang Children’s production of bare nominals is universal. When acquiring languages disallowing bare nominals, children will develop from the bare to the non-bare stage. However, Mandarin nominals may appear bare or non-bare in various positions with all kinds of interpretations. This dissertation conducts two acquisition studies to examine the production and interpretation of bare and non-bare nominals in Mandarin. The production study examined the spontaneous speech data produced by two Mandarin-speaking children: a girl (2;0-2;6) and a boy (2;10-3;3). Distributional analyses and variation analyses using GoldVarb were conducted to compare children’s production of bare and non-bare nominals, taking into consideration various syntactic and semantic aspects. The results show that four variables ‒ MLU, Interpretation, Verb Type, and Aspect Marker ‒ have significant effects on the variation of bare and non-bare nominals. Within the nominal phrase, (1) adjective is the first element children add to a bare noun root (age 2;0). (2) Possessives nominals emerge as early as age 2;1. (3) The order of appearance frequency: possessives, classifiers, numerals, and demonstratives. (4) Non-bare nominals most frequently associate with the object position and the existential interpretation. The comprehension study tested the interpretation of bare and demonstrative nominals among 110 Mandarin-speaking children and adults. The study finds that nominal types and age have significant effects on the interpretation. The findings show that (1) children, like adults, have both generic and existential definite readings for bare nominals. (2) They distinguish between bare and demonstrative nominals by assigning more generic interpretations to bare nominals. (3) They prefer generic readings for bare nominals, as opposed to existential definite readings. Demonstrative nominals also receive a considerable amount of generic interpretations. (4) Two variables significantly affect the interpretation of nominals: pragmatics and non-linguistic properties of the predicates. This study discovers a non-target generic interpretation of Mandarin demonstrative nominals assigned by both children and adults. The individual analysis finds a significantly positive correlation between the generic reading for demonstratives and that for bare nominals, which suggests that the generic reading of demonstratives may result from individual preference. The non-target generic interpretation may also be accounted for semantically and syntactically: (1) Mandarin-speaking children treat demonstratives as a less-specified determiner like the Spanish definite; (2) Mandarinspeaking children project demonstrative nominals as NP, not DP. The production study discovers variables that significantly associate with the emergence of the non-bare nominals and the order of emergence of various nominalinternal elements. The comprehension study reveals empirical data of the interpretation of bare and demonstrative nominals. This dissertation contributes to the understanding of the acquisition of Mandarin noun phrases and sheds light on further intralinguistic and crosslinguistic research. Copyright by HSIANG-HUA CHANG 2011

Acquisition of structure and interpretation : cases from Mandarin bare and non-bare noun phrases

We present an artificial language experiment investigating (i) how speakers of languages such as English with two-way obligatory distinctions between singular and plural learn a system where singular and plural are only optionally marked, and (ii) how learners extend their knowledge of the plural morpheme when under the scope of negation without explicit training. Production and comprehension results suggest that speakers of English did learn a system with only optional marking of number. Additionally, subjects did not accept an inclusive (“one or more than one”) interpretation of the plural when under the scope of negation, as in their native language, but rather assigned it an exclusive (“more than one”) interpretation. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that the meaning assigned to plural morphology is sensitive to the architecture of the system. In a binary number system with obligatory number marking, plural morphology can sometimes receive an inclusive interpretation. However, in...

The Interpretation of Plural Morphology and (Non-)Obligatory Number Marking: an Argument from Artificial Language Learning

Plural morphology exhibits differing interpretations across languages. For example, in downward entailing contexts in English, the plural receives a one or more (or inclusive) interpretation, whereas in Korean-like languages the plural always receives a more than one (or exclusive) interpretation, regardless of context. Previous experimental work using an artificial language suggests that such differences may follow from structural properties of these languages (Liter, Heffner & Schmitt 2017), namely lack of grammaticalization of the plural/singular distinction. In this paper we adopt Sauerland, Anderssen & Yatsushiro’s (2005) implicated presupposition analysis of the plural (the English plural is semantically unmarked, whereas the Korean plural is semantically marked, carrying a presupposition that the cardinality of its referent is greater than one) in order to test two hypotheses about the interpretation of the plural. Using an artificial language learning paradigm identical to that in Liter, Heffner & Schmitt (2017) with non-grammaticalized number but with a much greater frequency of singular/plural NPs in the input, we test (i) whether semantic markedness of the plural should be linked to the non-grammaticalization of the number paradigm; or (ii) whether semantic markedness follows from insufficient statistical evidence for simplifying the lexical entry for the plural. Our results show that participants continue to assign an exclusive interpretation to plural morphology under the scope of negation, which is compatible with the hypothesis that non-grammaticalized number entails semantic markedness.

https://www.glossa-journal.org/article/5007/galley/12101/download/

Grammaticalized number, implicated presuppositions, and the plural

Chapter 10. Vietnamese children’s interpretation of definite noun phrases

Acquisition of plurality in a language without plurality

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Acquisition of plurality in a language without plurality