Chapters 2 and 3 looked at the entailments and inferences that children and adults associate with the Mandarin disjunction word huozhe ‘or’, Chapter 4 investigated Mandarin-speaking children’s knowledge of another kind of &8707;∨-items, namely wh-words. P...[继续阅读]

    Experiment 2 examined the meaning differences between internal and external negation in English, a language in which disjunction is not a PPI for either children or adults. As discussed earlier, internal negation and externalnegation make distinct contrib...[继续阅读]

    Experiment 1 is a replication of previous research (Zhou et al. 2013; Tieu et el. 2016). It was designed to investigate whether children would compute conjunctive inferences for disjunctive sentences that contain a deontic modal verb.ParticipantsTwenty-tw...[继续阅读]

    Two accounts of children’s interpretation of sentences with disjunction are on the table. On one account, children compute conjunctive inferences in interpreting disjunctive sentences that lack any licensing expression. This account invokes a pragmatic pr...[继续阅读]

    This section reviews children’s computation of Free Choice Inferences in affirmative sentences, as well as children’s understanding of sentences with negation. We first review previous studies that have documented how young children compute FCIs in senten...[继续阅读]

    Syntactically, internal negation typically occurs sentence-internally, in the predicate phrase, as in sentence (1), whereas external negation typically appears in sentence-initial position, as in sentence (2).(1) It is true that John did not eat beef.(2) ...[继续阅读]

    As discussed earlier, wh-words have been analysed as -items. It is a puzzle,then, why wh-words are assigned universal force in declarative statements with the quantificational adverb dou, and why wh-words generate universal Free Choice Inferences (FCIs) w...[继续阅读]

    The study of children’s knowledge of entailments and inferences has great practical as well as theoretical significance.Firstly, the experimental investigations in the present study help us understand the degree to which human languages are logical. Altho...[继续阅读]

    In the theoretical literature, there are two competing accounts of dou-association. One account contends that dou is subject to a Leftness Condition, such that it only quantifies over an expression to its left (Cheng 1995; Lee 1986; Lin 1998). On an alter...[继续阅读]

    For adults, a disjunctive statement licenses a conjunctive Free ChoiceInference only if disjunction appears in the scope of a licensing expression, such as an epistemic modal verb (e.g., English can, or is able to) or a deontic modal verb (e.g., English m...[继续阅读]