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Competence, Performance, and the Locality of Quantifier Raising: Evidence from 4-Year-Old Children
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Competence, Performance, and the Locality of Quantifier Raising: Evidence from 4-Year-Old Children

Kristen Syrett and Jeffrey Lidz
Linguistic Inquiry, Vol.42(2), pp.305-337
2011
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7282/T32F7QGT

Abstract

Quantification (Linguistics) Syntax-semantics interface Form (Logic) VP-ellipsis Language processing Language acquisition Children--Language
We revisit the purported locality constraint on Quantifier Raising (QR) by investigating children’s and adults’ interpretation of antecedent contained-deletion (ACD) sentences, where the interpretation depends on the landing site targeted by QR out of an embedded clause. When ACD is embedded in a nonfinite clause, 4-year-old children and adults access both the embedded and the matrix interpretations. When ACD is embedded in a finite clause, and the matrix interpretation is generally believed to be ungrammatical, children and even some adults access both readings. These findings allow for the possibility that the source of QR’s reputed locality constraint may instead be extragrammatical, and they provide insight into the development of the human sentence parser.
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