Western Sydney University, Office of the Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research and Innovation), School of Education, The MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Australia.
Universität Konstanz, Department of Linguistics, Germany.
Cognition. 2020 Dec;205:104307. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104307. Epub 2020 Aug 12.
Plural morphology in English is associated with a multiplicity inference. For example, "Emily fed giraffes" is typically interpreted to mean that Emily fed multiple giraffes. It has long been observed that this inference disappears in downward-entailing linguistic environments, such as in the scope of negation. For example, "Emily didn't feed giraffes" does not merely suggest that she didn't feed multiple giraffes, but rather that she didn't feed any. There are three main approaches to explaining this puzzle: the first proposes that the plural is ambiguous, and invokes a preference for stronger meanings; the second derives multiplicity inferences as implicatures; and the third provides a homogeneity-based account. These different approaches can all account for the interpretation of the plural across upward- and downward-entailing environments. They differ, however, in what they predict for three further aspects of the plural: the status of positive and negative plural sentences in singular contexts, children's acquisition of plural meanings, and the relationship between plural meanings and scalar implicatures. In this paper, we report on three experiments investigating adults' and preschool-aged children's interpretation of plural morphology in English. The experiments reveal that participants distinguish positive and negative plural sentences presented in singular contexts, and that adults assign a different status to these positive and negative sentences. It is also observed that children, unlike adults, tend to accept underinformative positive plural sentences in singular contexts - in parallel with their behavior on standard scalar implicatures - while they are relatively more adult-like when it comes to negative plural sentences in the same contexts, showing a tendency to reject the negative sentences. We discuss how the findings of the three experiments are expected on a scalar implicature approach to multiplicity inferences, and the open challenges they pose for the ambiguity and homogeneity approaches.
英语中的复数形态与多重性推断有关。例如，“Emily fed giraffes”通常被解释为 Emily 喂了多只长颈鹿。长期以来，人们一直观察到，这种推断在向下蕴涵的语言环境中消失了，例如在否定的范围内。例如，“Emily didn't feed giraffes”不仅意味着她没有喂多只长颈鹿，而是意味着她没有喂任何一只。有三种主要的方法来解释这个难题：第一种方法提出复数是模糊的，并援引了对更强意义的偏好；第二种方法将多重性推断作为隐含意义；第三种方法提供了基于同质性的解释。这些不同的方法都可以解释复数在向上和向下蕴涵环境中的解释。然而，它们在以下三个方面的预测有所不同：单数环境中肯定和否定复数句的地位、儿童对复数意义的习得以及复数意义和数量暗示之间的关系。在本文中，我们报告了三项实验，调查了成年人和学龄前儿童对英语复数形态的解释。实验表明，参与者区分了单数语境中呈现的肯定和否定复数句，并且成年人赋予这些肯定和否定句子不同的地位。还观察到，与成年人不同，儿童在单数语境中倾向于接受信息量不足的肯定复数句——与他们在标准数量暗示方面的行为一致——而在相同语境中，他们对否定复数句的行为则相对更像成年人，表现出拒绝否定句的倾向。我们讨论了在数量暗示方法下，这些实验的发现如何预期多重性推断，并讨论了它们对歧义性和同质性方法提出的开放性挑战。
