Dear all,
The next ComSyn talk will be on February 27 by Loes Koring. Please see below
for more info and the abstract.
We hope to see you all there!
Best wishes,
The ComSyn team
Speaker: Loes Koring (Leiden)
Title: Disjointness in Child Language
Date: Thursday 27 February
Venue: Wijkplaats 2/005
Time: 15.15 - 16.30 hrs (drinks afterwards at Café de Keyser)
Abstract:
A word like 'somebody' introduces a novel referent to the discourse. Adult
speakers of English typically accept (1) in a context in which the person who
brought wine is different from the one who brought beer.
(1) Somebody brought wine and somebody brought beer to the party.
The disjointness in reference in (1) does not follow from the semantics of the
existentially quantified argument, but rather from an implicature of
disjointness. Results from an experiment with 3- to 5-year-old English-speaking
children show that children have no difficulty deriving disjointness in
sentences like (1). Results from two more experiments demonstrate that children
do have difficulty, however, deriving the disjointness implicature when the
existentially quantified argument is left implicit. This is the case in short
verbal passives as in (2).
(2) The girl is being painted.
Verbal passives involve existential quantification of the external argument,
giving rise to an implicature of disjointness, like in (1). As a result, (2) is
not compatible with a reflexive event in which the girl painted herself. In
contrast to adults, 3-year-olds accept (2) as a description of a reflexive
event. I will discuss these results as well as the implications for the syntax
of adjectival passives.
