Children's interpretation of superlatives in full and fragment answers
Lyn Tieu, Zheng Shen
January 2022
 

Cross-linguistically, sentences containing superlatives like "Donkey bought the biggest photo of Kangaroo" allow up to three possible readings: an 'absolute' reading (Of all of the photos of Kangaroo, Donkey bought the biggest one), a 'relative reading with NP-external focus' (Donkey bought a bigger photo of Kangaroo than others did), and a 'relative reading with NP-internal focus' (The biggest photo that Donkey bought was of Kangaroo, not of someone else). While the absolute reading and relative reading with NP-external focus are universally available across languages, the availability of the relative reading with NP-internal focus is restricted. In languages like English, which has overt determiners, the relative internal reading is only allowed when the focus undergoes overt movement out of the DP (Tomaszewicz 2015); as such, it is argued to be available in fragment answers to wh-questions, but not in full declaratives (Shen 2018). We designed a guessing game to investigate English-speaking adults’ and 4- and 5-year-old children’s interpretations of superlatives in full and fragment answers to wh-questions. The results reveal that for adults, the availability of the relative internal reading is indeed restricted to fragment answers; on the other hand, 4- and 5-year-olds can be led to accept the relative reading in both full and fragment answers. We discuss a possible explanation for the observed difference between adults and children involving the recasting of the puppet’s declarative sentences as fragments, effectively neutralizing the difference between full and fragment answers.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/006426
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: Proceedings of the 46th Boston University Conference on Language Development
keywords: superlatives, fragment answers, ellipsis, acquisition, child language, semantics, syntax
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