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Part of
L1 Acquisition and L2 Learning: The view from Romance
Edited by Larisa Avram, Anca Sevcenco and Veronica Tomescu
[Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 65] 2021
► pp. 315–330

Chapter 12
The acquisition of disjunction under negation and recursive ni in French

| University of Milano-Bicocca
| Università degli Studi di Padova
| University of Geneva | University of Fribourg

Pagliarini, Crain, & Guasti (2018) showed that children acquiring Italian start to attribute a “neither” interpretation to negative disjunctive sentences, but converge to the adult “at least one” interpretation earlier than children acquiring Japanese or Mandarin. This earlier convergence is attributed to the already adult interpretation of a lexical form that expresses the “neither” interpretation unambiguously (recursive né). We further test this proposal with French negated disjunctive sentences, where a similar lexical form (recursive ni) is available, but with different properties than in Italian. We conclude that, for an earlier convergence to the adult interpretation of OR under negation, what matters is the availability of a minimal pair of expressions and not just of an expression that conveys the “neither” meaning.

Keywords: disjunction, negation, scope, negative concord, child French
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Children’s interpretation of disjunction in negative sentences
  • 3.Our study
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Procedure
    • 3.3Materials
    • 3.4Predictions
    • 3.5Results of the Neg OR experiment
    • 3.6Results of the Recursive ni experiment
  • 4.Discussion
  • Authors’ contribution
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 17 November 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.65.12gua
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