In theoretical linguistics, there are two different kinds of negation:predicate negation and propositional negation, which have different semantic/pragmatic functions (see Bar-Asher Siegal 2015; Bochvar 1981; Horn 1985, 2001; Karttunen & Peters 1979; Ladu...[继续阅读]

    Previous research has found that Mandarin-speaking children assign a universal interpretation to sentences with a wh-word followed by dou (Zhou &Crain 2011; Zhou 2013). For example, using a variant of the Truth ValueJudgment Task called the Question-State...[继续阅读]

    By definition, an entailment is a relation that holds between propositions. Suppose there are two propositions: P and Q. If P entails Q, then the truth of Q necessarily follows from the truth of P (cf. Lyons 1977). Sentence (1) illustrates the entailment ...[继续阅读]

    In many previous studies, children younger than 6 have been reported to produce and accept statements with disjunction in circumstances in which only one disjunct was true (e.g., Boster & Crain 1993; Chierchia et al. 2004; Crain et al. 2002; Goro et al. 2...[继续阅读]

    This dissertation looks at Mandarin-speaking children’s knowledge of the entailments and inferences associated with &8707;∨-items. To provide a fuller picture of the unified account of the items, there is still much work to do. First, it remains unknown w...[继续阅读]

    This chapter investigates the empirical consequences of two kinds of negation. In the theoretical literature, these two negations are often referred to as predicate negation and propositional negation (see, e.g., Bochvar 1981; Horn 1985, 2001; Karttunen &...[继续阅读]

    This dissertation investigates Mandarin-speaking children’s knowledge of the entailments and inferences associated with a number of logical expressions. These logical expressions include the disjunction word huozhe ‘or’, the deontic modal verb keyi ‘is al...[继续阅读]

    Experiment 3 was designed to investigate whether Mandarin-speaking children distinguish between universal statements and exhaustive wh-questions. The experiment compared minimal pairs of sentences, namely sentences with a wh-word followed by dou versus on...[继续阅读]

    There were three main findings. First, the finding from Experiment 1 was that both children and adults licensed a conjunctive inference to disjunctive sentences that contained a licensing expression (e.g., is allowed to). This constitutes a replication of...[继续阅读]

    The present chapter gave rise to four main findings. First, Mandarin-speaking children computed a conjunctive entailment (the ‘neither’ interpretation) in response to sentences with internal negation, a modal verb and disjunction, whereas adults assigned ...[继续阅读]