Speaker: Ayaka Sugawara
\nTitle: A-scrambling, Reconstruction and the Computation of Alternatives under Prosody in Japanese: Evidence from Acquisition
\nDate\/Time: Tuesday, Apr 15, 1-2p
\nLocation: 32-D461<\/p>\n
\n(Joint work with Ken Wexler.)<\/p>\n
A major open question in the theory of language acquisition is why children speaking English seem to have difficulty interpreting inverse scope of negation and a universal subject quantifier. Our results contribute both to the solution to this puzzle and provide evidence for particular approaches to the A-movement of Japanese and the theory of contrastive topic. We will argue that children have difficulty with at least some forms of reconstruction, but do not have a problem with interpreting a particular logical form. In Japanese, a scope-rigid language, (1) is unambiguous, while its English counterpart is not.<\/p>\n
(1) Minna-ga siken-o uke-nak-atta.
\n Everyone-NOM exam-ACC take-NEG-PAST
\n \u0091Everyone didn\u0092t take the exam\u0092 (ok\u0093all>not\u0094, *\u0093not>all\u0094)<\/p>\nOne way to get wide scope of negation is to scramble an object over the subject (Miyagawa ‘01, ‘10, a.o.). The scrambled sentence in (2) is ambiguous between the all>not reading (preferred) and the not>all reading (less preferred), while the non-scrambled sentence in (1) does not have the not>all reading.<\/p>\n
(2) [siken-o] minna-ga uke-nak-atta.
\n Exam-ACC everyone-NOM take-NEG-PAST
\n \u0091Everyone didn\u0092t take the exam.\u0092 (ok\u0093all>not\u0094 ok\u0093not>all\u0094)<\/p>\nIn Miyagawa\u0092s analysis, (2) receives the not>all reading because it does not violate rigid scope; the scrambled object optionally moves to [Spec, T], leaving the subject in [Spec, v], thus c-commanding negation. If children accept the not>all reading in (2), then they understand the not>all LF and can access it when reconstruction is not necessary. Our first experiment shows that indeed children accept the not>all reading of (2).<\/p>\n
Another way, and the only unambiguous way to obtain the not>all reading is to have a high pitch contour on the universal quantifier followed by a topic marker \u0096wa (Contrastive Topic), as in (3) (Hara ‘06, Nakanishi ‘07, a.o.). The not>all reading is derived by adopting B\u00fcring\u0092s (1997) Alternative Semantics approach to German Topic-Focus sentences.<\/p>\n
(3) [Minna-wa]_F siken-o uke-nak-atta.
\n Everyone-TOP exam-ACC take-NEG-PAST
\n \u0091Everyone didn\u0092t take the exam\u0092 (*\u0093all>not\u0094, ok\u0093not>all\u0094)<\/p>\nOur second experiment shows that children completely fail to get the unambiguous not>all reading in (3). The difficulty seems to be related to the same type of \u0093alternatives comparison\u0094 difficulty that is the major explanation of children\u0092s difficulties with scalar implicatures.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Speaker: Ayaka Sugawara Title: A-scrambling, Reconstruction and the Computation of Alternatives under Prosody in Japanese: Evidence from Acquisition Date\/Time: Tuesday, Apr 15, 1-2p Location: 32-D461 (Joint work with Ken Wexler.) A major open question in the theory of language acquisition is why children speaking English seem to have difficulty interpreting inverse scope of negation and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6045","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-talks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6045","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6045"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6045\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6482,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6045\/revisions\/6482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}