The Comparative Study On The Acquisition Of Chinese Presupposition And Scalar Implicature

This study is committed to explore the children’s acquisition of presupposition and scalar implicature,survey the critical age for children to obtain two types of pragmatic meanings,and investigate the interaction between presupposition and scalar implicature in the process of pragmatic interpretation.In this study,a total of 320 children aged 5-8 were selected as subjects,and the Chinese adverb ye and the scalar quantifier yixie are used as pragmatic triggers for the presupposition and scalar implicature respectively.These two experiments both adopt 2(presupposition factors: correct,wrong)× 2(scalar implicature factors: correct,wrong)two-factor within-subject design.In experiments,an analysis of variance was performed on the results of the participants’ judgments on these two types of lexical pragmatic meanings.Moreover,in order to explore whether the positional differences between scalar items and presupposed domain have an impact on children’s acquisition of lexical pragmatic meaning,in experiment 1,the scalar trigger yixie was placed externally in the presupposed domain of ye;in experiment 2,the scalar trigger yixie was embedded within the scope of ye.After analysis of the interactions between the results of two sets of experiments and two factors of presupposition and scalar implicature in the process of children’s pragmatic meaning acquisition,this study can draw the following conclusions:(1)The age of 7 is a critical stage for children to acquire the ability of presupposition and scalar implicature,and children aged 5 to 6 are insensitive to these two types of pragmatic meanings.(2)The presupposed domain has a significant effect on the acquisition of presuppositions.Compared with the case where the presupposed domain is the whole test sentence,the subjects have a higher acquisition rate when the presupposed domain is the predicate of sentences.(3)Presuppositions have a significant effect on the acquisition of scalar implicature.Compared with the scalar trigger yixie placed outside the scope of ye,when the scalar trigger yixie was embedded within the scope of ye,the subjects’ acquisition rate of scalar implicature was significantly higher.