CNL Lunch

Anna Papafragou (University of Pennsylvania)

Scalar Inferences in Language Acquisition

Thursday May 9th, 12:30pm, 3416 Marie Mount Hall

Much research in linguistic theory seeks to uncover how semantic information and pragmatic inference jointly contribute to the way humans interpret utterances in context. Until recently, however, little was known about how the ability to integrate lexically encoded and contextually inferred aspects of meaning develops during language learning. This talk attempts to address this question focusing on one of the best-known cases of pragmatic inference, scalar inferences (SIs; cf. Some professors are famous -> Not all professors are famous). I report the results from two experiments which investigated preschoolers' understanding of SIs in environments involving quantifiers ('some'), numerals ('two') and aspectual verbs ('start'). It was found that, given appropriate contextual conditions, 5-year-old children had some success in deriving SIs. Furthermore, children's success depended crucially on the nature of the scalar term: number expressions were more successful SI-triggers than other scalar expressions. These results suggest that there are interesting asymmetries within the semantic class of scalar expressions; they also
show that these asymmetries are reflected in the architecture of early
conversational inferences. I explore one possible source of scalar asymmetries, the 'discrete' nature of numerical modifiers, and show that it correctly predicts the behavior of other discrete modifiers (e.g. 'half') and the early acquisitional patterns of number words vs. vague quantifiers. I conclude by discussing some implications of this work for the development of the semantics/pragmatics interface.