Cover not available
Part of
Three Streams of Generative Language Acquisition Research: Selected papers from the 7th Meeting of Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition – North America, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Edited by Tania Ionin and Matthew Rispoli
[Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 63] 2019
► pp. 107–124

The interpretation of disjunction in VP ellipsis in Mandarin Chinese

| Beijing Language and Culture University
| Macquarie University
| Tsinghua University
| Macquarie University
This study investigated the interpretation assigned to disjunction by Mandarin-speaking children and adults in negative sentences with either overt or covert disjunction. In one condition, both negation and disjunction were phonologically realized in the second conjunct of a coordinate structure. In a second condition, disjunction was elided from the verb phrase. Children and adults differed in scope assignments when both negation and disjunction were phonologically realized. However, negation took scope over disjunction for both groups when disjunction was elided. The findings invite the inference that adults, but not children, analyze disjunction as a Positive Polarity Item in negative sentences, but this polarity sensitivity is cancelled in sentences with verb phrase ellipsis. In this linguistic structure, both groups assign the same interpretation.
Keywords: verb phrase ellipsis, disjunction, scope assignment, child Mandarin
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The interpretation of disjunction in child and adult language
  • 3.Verb Phrase (VP) ellipsis
  • 4.The experiment
    • 4.1Participants
    • 4.2Procedures
  • 5.Results
  • 6.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 15 April 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.63.06gao
References (37)
References
Berwick, R. C. (1985). Acquisition of syntactic knowledge. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chomsky, N. (1995). The minimalist program. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
(2015). A minimalist program for linguistic theory. In N. Chomsky (Ed.), The minimalist program (pp.153–199). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Crain, S. (2008). The interpretation of disjunction in universal grammar. Language and Speech, 51(1–2), 151–169. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2012). The emergence of meaning. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Crain, S., & Philip, W. (1993). Global semantic dependencies in child language. Paper presented at the 16th GLOW Colloquium, Lund, Sweden.Google Scholar
Crain, S., Ni, W., & Conway, L. (1994). Learning, parsing, and modularity. In C. J. Clifton, L. Frazier, & K. Rayner (Eds.), Perspectives on sentence processing (pp.443–467). New York NY: Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Crain, S., & Thornton, R. (1998). Investigations in Universal Grammar –A guide to experiments on the acquisition of syntax. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Crain, S., Gardener, A., Gualmini, A., & Rabbin, B. (2002). Children’s command of negation. In Y. Otsu (Ed.), Proceedings of the 3rd Tokyo Conference on Psycholinguistics (pp.165–190). Tokyo: Hituzi Syobo.Google Scholar
Crain, S., & Khlentzos, D. (2010). The logic instinct. Mind & Language, 25, 30–65. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Crain, S., & Thornton, R. (2015). 3rd year grammar. In A. Gallego, & D. Ott (Eds.), 50 years later (pp.71–84). Cambridge, MA: MIT Working Papers in Linguistics.Google Scholar
Crain, S., Koring, L., & Thornton, R. (2017). Language acquisition from a biolinguistic perspective. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 81, 1–30. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Croft, W. (2001). Radical construction grammar. Oxford: OUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Geçkin, V., Crain, S., & Thornton, R. (2016). The interpretation of logical connectives in Turkish. Journal of Child Language, 43(4), 784–810. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goro, T. (2004). The emergence of Universal Grammar in the emergence of language: The acquisition of Japanese logical connectives and positive polarity (Unpublished MA thesis). The University of Maryland.Google Scholar
(2007). Language-specific constraints on scope interpretation in first language acquisition (Unpublished PhD dissertation). The University of Maryland.Google Scholar
Goro, T., & Akiba, S. (2004a). The acquisition of disjunction and positive polarity in Japanese. In V. Chand, A. Kelleher, A. J. Rodriguez, & B. Schmeiser (Eds.), Proceedings of the 23rd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (pp.251–264). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
(2004b). Japanese disjunction and the acquisition of positive polarity. In Y. Otsu (Ed.), Proceedings of the 5th Tokyo Conference on Psycholinguistics (pp.137–162). Tokyo: Hituzi Shobo.Google Scholar
Goro, T. (in press). Negation uncertainty, and the Truth Value Judgment Task. In M. Nakayama, Y.-C. Su, & A. Huang (Eds.), Studies in Chinese and Japanese language acquisition: In honor of Stephen Crain (Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 60) (pp.12–29). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Gualmini, A., Crain, S., & Meroni, L. (2000). Acquisition of disjunction in conditional sentences. In C. Howell, S. Fish, & T. Keith-Lucas (Eds.), Proceedings of the 24th annual Boston University Conference on Language Deveopment (pp.367–378). Sommerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Guo, F., Foley, C., Chien, Y.-C., Chiang, C.-P., & Lust, B. C. (1996). Operator-variable binding in the initial state: A cross-linguistic study of VP ellipsis structures in Chinese and English. Cahiers de Linguistique- Asie Orientale, 25(1), 3–34. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jayaseelan, K. A. (2001). Questions and question-word incorporating quantifiers in Malayalam. Syntax, 4(2), 63–93. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jing, C.-Y., Crain, S., & Hsu, C.-F. (2005). The interpretation of focus in Chinese: child vs. adult language. In Y. Otsu (Ed.), Proceedings of the 6th Tokyo Conference on Psycholinguistics (pp.165–179). Tokyo: Hituzi Syobo.Google Scholar
Klima, E. (1964). Negation in English. In J. A. Fodor & J. J. Katz (Eds.), The structure of language: Readings in the philosophy of language. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.Google Scholar
Lee, O.-S. (2010). Acquisition of Korean disjunction under negation. Working Papers in Linguistics, Department of Linguistics, University of Hawai'i at Mãnoa, 41(7), 1–12.Google Scholar
Morris, B. J. (2008). Logically speaking: Evidence for item-based acquisition of the connectives AND & OR. Journal of Cognition and Development, 9, 67–88. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pietroski, P., & Crain, S. (2012). The language faculty. In E. Margolis, R. Samuels, & S. P. Stich (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of philosophy and cognitive science (pp.361–381). Oxford: OUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Spector, B. (2014). Global positive polarity items and obligatory exhaustivity. Semantics and Pragmatics, 7, 1–61.Google Scholar
Syrett, K., & Lidz, J. (2011). Competence, performance, and locality of quantifier raising: Evidence from 4-year-old children. Linguistic Inquiry, 42, 305–337. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Szabolcsi, A. (2002). Hungarian disjunctions and positive polarity. In I. Kenesei & P. Siptar (Eds.), Approaches to Hungarian (Vol. 8). Szeged: University of Szeged.Google Scholar
(2004). Positive polarity-negative polarity. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 22(2), 409–452. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Thornton, R., & Wexler, K. (1999). Principle B, VP ellipsis, and interpretation in child grammar. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Tieu, L., Romoli, J., Zhou, P., & Crain, S. (2016). Children’s knowledge of free choice inferences and scalar implicatures. Journal of Semantics, 33(2), 269–298. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tomasello, M. (2000). Do children have adult syntactic competence? Cognition, 74, 209–253.Google Scholar
(2003). Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Verbuk, A. (2006). The acquisition of the Russian or. In E. Brainbridge & B. Agbayani (Eds.), Proceedings of the thirty-fourth Western Conference on Linguistics (pp.443–455). Fresno, CA: Department of Linguistics, California State University.Google Scholar
Zhou, P., Romoli, J., & Crain, S. (2013). Children’s knowledge of free choice inferences. In T. Snider (Ed.), Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 23 (pp.632–651). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University.Google Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Fujiwara, Yoshiki & Hiroyuki Shimada
2024.  Acquisition of overt and covert and : support for the semantic subset principle . Language Acquisition 31:1 ► pp. 22 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 27 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.