Cory Bill

The previous literature has distinguished between two types of bias in polar questions: “original bias”, which reflects the speaker’s prior belief regarding the truth of the answers, and “contextual bias”, which conveys freshly introduced evidence for or against a given answer. Building on these two fundamental biases and employing a novel diagnostic based on bare polar response particles, we argue for the existence of a third type of bias, which we call “projected bias”, indicating the answer that the speaker considers most likely to enter the Common Ground. We posit this flavor of bias on account of its distinct alignment pattern, which cannot be attributed to merely mirroring one of the two fundamental biases or to a random choice between the two. Specifically, while projected bias requires the presence of a fundamental bias in order to arise, it may align with either of them and displays a strong affinity with contextual bias when the two fundamental biases are in conflict. We capture this alignment pattern by appealing to differences in evidential strength between original and contextual bias, thereby highlighting the manner in which projected bias coordinates on the discourse goal shared by the speaker and the addressee of resolving the issue raised by the question. We make our proposal explicit by implementing it within the Scoreboard Model.

Mitrović & Sauerland (2014, 2016) claim that, across languages, DP-conjunction decomposes into [JP [MuP [DP1 ⟳] MU] [J’ J [MuP [DP2 ⟳] MU]]]. Their account, when combined with the independently motivated assumption that children better comprehend utterances which display a greater degree of 1-to-1 mapping between form and meaning (van Hout 2008, Guasti et al. 2023: a.o.), predicts that sentences where only J or MU are pronounced should be harder to comprehend relative to sentences where both J and MU are realized. We conducted an experiment testing this prediction by investigating children’s comprehension of conjunctive expressions in Georgian and Hungarian. While, for Hungarian, we did not find any differences between the types of conjunctive expressions, for Georgian, we found evidence that J-MU expressions were harder for children to comprehend than J or MU expressions. Our results challenge the account by Mitrović & Sauerland (2014, 2016) and cannot be captured by other existing accounts of conjunctive expressions either (Szabolcsi 2015, Haslinger et al. 2019). EARLY ACCESS

Recursion is a central topic in language acquisition because it helps to inform an explanatorily adequate theory of the human language faculty. Some researchers (e.g., Roeper, 2011) have proposed that it is possible for children’s early grammars to include a transitory acquisition stage that is based on conjunction rather than the truly recursive operation of merge which characterizes mature grammars. A truth-value judgement task with an elicitation component was designed to elicit recursive genitive structures in both Mandarin and English. Our results indicate that child participants in both Mandarin and English understood recursive genitive structures and a substantial majority could also produce the target recursive genitive structures. These results provide compelling evidence that recursion emerges early in child language acquisition and that there is no need to propose a transitory stage that lacks a recursive procedure.

Children acquiring a non-negative concord language like English or German have been found to consistently interpret sentences with two negative elements in a negative concord manner as conveying a single semantic negation. Corpus-based investigations for English and German show that children also produce sentences with two negative elements but only a single negation meaning. As any approach to negative concord and negative indefinites needs to account for both the typological variation and the child data, we revisit the three most current syntactic Agree-based analyses, as well as a movement-based approach and show that they either have difficulties with the child data or face challenges in the adult language variation or both. As a consequence, we develop a novel analysis of negative concord and negative indefinites which relies on purely morphological operations applying to hierarchical semantic representations within a version of the Meaning First architecture of grammar. We will argue that the typological variation between the main three different types of languages as well as the children’s non adult-like behaviour fall out from this in a straightforward fashion while the downsides of the Agree- and the movement-based accounts are avoided.

Presuppositions and scalar implicatures are traditionally considered to be distinct phenomena, but recent accounts analyze (at least some of) the former as the latter. All else being equal, this “scalar implicature approach to presuppositions” predicts uniform behavior for the two types of inferences. Initial experimental studies comparing them yielded conflicting results. While some found a difference in the Response Time (RT) patterns of scalar implicatures and presuppositions, others found them to be uniform. We argue that the difference in outcomes is attributable to a difference in the type of response being measured: RTs associated with acceptance and rejection responses seem to pattern in opposite ways. Next, we report on a series of experiments to support this, and to compare the behavior of the two inferences more comprehensively. Experiments Ia and Ib look at both acceptance and rejection responses for both inference types, and find uniform patterns once the acceptance vs. rejection variable is factored in. Experiment II adds a new dimension by testing for the influence of prosody on the two inference types, and in this regard a clear difference between them emerges, posing a first substantive challenge to the scalar implicature approach to presuppositions. A third set of experiments investigates yet another prediction of this approach, according to which the presuppositional inference is introduced as a simple entailment in affirmative contexts. This predicts that these presuppositional inferences behave parallel to other entailments. Experiment IIIa compares rejections of affirmative sentences based on either their presuppositional inference or their entailed content and finds that they differ, with greater RTs for the former. As an additional control, Experiments IIIb and IIIc test for parallel differences between two entailments associated with always, which yield uniform results. In sum, while Experiments Ia and Ib are in line with previous findings that presuppositions and scalar implicatures under negation show uniform response time patterns, the differences found in Experiments II and IIIa-c pose a substantial challenge to approaches assimilating the two phenomena, while being entirely in line with the traditional perspective of seeing them as distinct.

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.

The nature of presupposition projection from the scope of quantificational expressions, particularly negative ones, continues to be both theoretically and empirically controversial. We experimentally investigate the interpretation of sentences like None of the bears won the race, which could in principle be associated with three projection options, giving rise to: an existential reading, on which at least one of the bears participated and none won; a universal reading, on which all of the bears participated and none won; and a presuppositionless reading on which none of the bears both participated and won. We used a covered box task to investigate English-speaking adults’ and children’s interpretations of such sentences. The results from the adult participants provide empirical evidence for all three readings; the results from the child participants, however, reveal no evidence for the existential reading. We discuss our results in light of competing theoretical accounts, focusing on options for reconciling the theories with the experimental data from both adults and children.