Competence, Performance, and the Locality of Quantifier Raising: Evidence from 4-Year-Old Children
Year: 2011
Type: article
Abstract: We revisit the purported locality constraint on Quantifier Raising (QR) by investigating children's and adults' interpretation of antecedent-contained-deletion (ACD) sentences, where the interpretation depends on the landing site targeted by QR out of an embedded clause. When ACD is embedded in a nonfinite clause, 4-year-old children and adults access both the embedded and the matrix interpretations. When ACD is embedded in a finite clause, and the matrix interpretation is generally believed to be ungrammatical, children and even some adults access both readings. These findings allow for the possibility that the source of QR's reputed locality constraint may instead be extragrammatical, and they provide insight into the development of the human sentence parser.
Source: Linguistic Inquiry
DOI: 10.1162/ling_a_00043
Authors: Kristen Syrett, Jeffrey Lidz
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2150849350