A Developmental Study On The Scope Interaction Between Negation And Quantification In Child Mandarin

In English,two logical operators in a sentence may result in scope ambiguity.In the sentence that “a little duck didn’t sit on the chair”,scopes of existential quantified noun phrase and negation interact,yielding the isomorphic reading(or surface reading)that “one of the ducks didn’t sit on the chair” and the non-isomorphic reading(or inverse reading)that “none of the ducks sat on the chair”.Besides,two readings form a relation of asymmetrical entailment.That is,the inverse reading makes the sentence true in the smallest set of circumstances in which the surface reading is true.Theoretically,the Chinese counterpart will yield two interpretations on a semantic level,but theorists agreed that sentences do no permit ambiguity in Chinese in most cases.Mandarin-speaking adults isomorphically interpret the sentence of this kind.you yi-zhi xiaoyazi meiyou zuo dao yizi shanghave one-CL little.duck not sit to chair on‘A little duck did not sit on the chair.’However,this agreement was challenged by some empirical studies which found that the inverse reading of the quantified sentences with negation was accepted by children and adults.Thus,one of the problems that this study aims at solving is to figuring out whether ambiguous interpretations are permitted in some other negative quantified structures in Chinese or not.Moreover,the study aims at verifying two learnability principles,namely Semantic Subset Principle and Semantic Subset Maxim,which were raised to solve the learnability problem that children will face when encounter ambiguous sentences in which two interpretations form a relation of asymmetrical entailment.Therefore,the research questions are: How do Mandarin-speaking children interpret the sentences with negation and existential quantifiers? What are the underlying patterns they will follow in scope assignment? Are the hypotheses of SSP and SSM convincing to solve the learnability problem?Our results showed that both mandarin-speaking pre-schoolers and adults accepted the inverse interpretation of the sentences in which existential quantified noun phrases preceded negation in the overt syntax.However,significant differences were found between pre-school children and adults in the scope assignment.The acceptability of the inverse reading of children was higher than that of adults.The reasons of the difference are threefold.Firstly,children did not firmly establish the Isomorphic Principle like adults,and the establishment of this principle is not simultaneous in different quantified sentences.Secondly,the lexical meaning of “yi” was a key factor in children’s interpretation of the sentences.Thirdly,they were insensitive to the scalar implicature,so that they would accept to the inverse scope reading which was less informative.Moreover,we found that children highly accepted the inverse reading of “meiyou yi(Cl.)NP VP(none of NP VP)” for the reason that they treated “meiyou” as a negative chunk and replaced this chunk into another negative marker “bushi”.Besides,the finding showed that pre-schoolers at the age of four accepted the subset reading and the superset reading of certain test sentences with no preference.It challenged the prediction of Semantic Subset Principle that children initially hypothesize the entailing(subset)reading of the ambiguities.It also challenged the prediction of Semantic Subset Maxim that children hypothesize both readings at the initial stage but display a default preference for only the subset reading.In this way,the finding suggests that the view that children’s development of scope phenomenon initially is driven by a categorical constraint or a default preference needs to be reconsidered and needs more potent evidence to support itself.