Chapter published in:
Semantics in Language Acquisition
Edited by Kristen Syrett and Sudha Arunachalam
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 24] 2018
► pp. 302–324

Chapter 13. Developmental insights into gappy phenomena

Comparing presupposition, implicature, homogeneity, and vagueness

| Western Sydney University / Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, Macquarie University
| Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, Macquarie University
| University of Pennsylvania
| Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, Macquarie University / Ulster University
| University of Pennsylvania

In natural language, we encounter various sentence types that, under certain circumstances, are evaluated as neither true nor false. For instance, it is intuitively difficult to assess the truth value of a sentence whose presupposition is not satisfied in the context. A common theoretical approach is to characterize the status of such sentences with a third value of one kind or another. In this chapter, we consider children’s acquisition of four linguistic phenomena that can give rise to ‘gappy’ judgments that correspond neither to True nor False: scalar implicature, presupposition, homogeneity, and vagueness. We discuss how young children’s interpretations of such sentences can provide insight into how these phenomena should be treated within semantic theories.

Keywords: homogeneity, vagueness, scalar implicature, presupposition, truth value gaps
Published online: 02 August 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.24.13tie
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