Acquisition Of The Disjunction Word Huozhe In Child Mandarin

The research of logical connectives is a hot topic in child language acquisition. In adult grammar, the interpretation of the disjunction word huozhe in downward entailing contexts and non-downward entailing contexts is striking asymmetric across languages(Su & Crain 631). Using the Truth Value Judgment Task, the present research aims to investigate 3-6-year-old Mandarin-speaking children‘s interpretation of huozhe in both downward entailing contexts and non-downward entailing contexts, and to compare the similarities and differences in child language and adult language.In classical logic and formal semantics, the disjunction word huozhe usually gets the inclusive-or interpretation( Cihai 2455; Chen Aihua 87; Chen Bo 52; Cheng 73; Yang 13-5; Cann 68; Crain et al 2000: 49; Fang 77-81; Kearns 28; Partee et al 103-4); while in pragmatics, adults prefers to interpret it as exclusive-or(Levinson 139-40). The reason for this difference is that classical logic and formal semantics deal with ideal or artificial language in general, but pragmatics usually deals with ordinary or natural language. The latter will be influenced by pragmatic factors such as cooperation principle and scalar implicatures, while the former won‘t. Downward entailment is a core semantic property across languages, and scalar implicatures will be cancelled in downward entailing contexts(Su and Crain 2013; Su 2014). Therefore, disjunction should be interpreted as inclusive-or in downward entailing contexts and exclusive-or in non-downward entailing contexts. Three experiments have been conducted in this research to investigate children‘s understanding of the disjunction word huozhe in these two kinds of contexts. Specifically, three questions need to be answered. Firstly, will Mandarin-speaking children assign an inclusive-or reading or an exclusive-or reading to the disjunction word huozhe? i.e., do children‘s interpretations of huozhe conform to the corresponding expressions in classical logic? Secondly, are Mandarin-speaking children aware of the different properties of non-downward entailment and downward entailment? Thirdly, is children‘s acquisition of the disjunction word huozhe innately specified or learned from experience?The research found that unlike adults, 3-6-year-old Mandarin-speaking children assigned an inclusive-or interpretation to disjunction whether it appeared in downward entailing contexts or in non-downward entailing contexts, which indicated that 3-6-year-old children were not as sensitive as adults to scalar implicatures and their knowledge of the disjunction word huozhe conforms to the corresponding expressions in classical logic. Although children assigned the same interpretation to disjunction in downward entailing contexts and in non-downward entailing contexts, they indeed distinguished the different semantic properties of these two environments. This result showed that children were aware of the core semantic property of downward entailment at an early stage, which supported the conclusions reached by Su & Crain(2013) and Su(2014). Our research challenged the Usage-based Model proposed by Tomasello while it provided supports for Stephen Crain‘s Logical Nativism or Chomsky‘s Universal Grammar. Because young children preferred to assign a logical inclusive-or interpretation the the disjunction word huozhe, and there was no decisive evidence that children‘s interpretation of huozhe stemmed from the adult input. Adults preferred to interpret disjunction as exclusive-or in non-downward entailing situations, whereas children consistently adhered to the inclusive-or reading, which suggested that children‘s knowledge of disjunction was not based on the statistic studies in the primary linguistic input but was innately endowed in the mind.