Conjunctive Disjunctions: when adults behave like children
Paul Marty, Andreea Nicolae
July 2021
 

Results from acquisition studies show that, in contrast to adults, some children interpret disjunctive sentences conjunctively, i.e., they accept sentences of the form "p or q" as true only when both p and q are true. According to the missing alternative view (Singh et al. 2016), this discrepancy between children and adults reflects a difference in semantic competence: children perform conjunctive strengthening because, at their stage of development, they haven't acquired yet the knowledge that "p and q" is a scalar alternative to "p or q". According to the conflict resolution view (Skordos et al. 2020, see also Tieu et al. 2017), on the other hand, this discrepancy reflects a difference in how children and adults handle pragmatic infelicities: children show conjunctive responding because they default to different resolution strategies than adults in situations where the experimental task brings about conflicting pragmatic inferences, e.g., in situations where the ignorance inferences associated with "p or q" conflict with contextual assumptions. In this paper, we explain how these two explanatory views lead to different predictions regarding the availability of conjunctive strengthening/responding in adult speakers, and we report on three experiments that tested these predictions across different tasks and languages. Our results show that, when the experimental task induces acute pragmatic infelicities, some adult speakers start behaving like children in interpreting disjunction conjunctively, and this independently of their general ability to compute scalar implicatures involving lexical alternatives. We explain how these findings support the conflict resolution approach and we discuss their relevance to account for the variations observed across tasks and studies regarding the prevalence of conjunctive responses in children.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/006116
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: Submitted
keywords: disjunction, conjunctive interpretation of disjunction, ignorance inferences, scalar implicatures, pragmatic infelicities, conflict resolution, semantics
Downloaded:284 times

 

[ edit this article | back to article list ]