All Together Now: Disentangling Semantics and Pragmatics with Together in Child and Adult Language.
All Together Now: Disentangling Semantics and Pragmatics with Together in Child and Adult Language.
复制标题
现在就在一起：在儿童和成人语言中解开语义和语用学。
DOI：
10.1080/10489223.2015.1067319
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发表时间：
2016
影响因子：
1.2
通讯作者：
Musolino,Julien
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Syrett,Kristen;Musolino,Julien
The way in which an event is packaged linguistically can be informative about the number of participants in the event and the nature of their participation. At times, however, a sentence is ambiguous, and pragmatic information weighs in to favor one interpretation over another. Whereas adults may readily know how to pick up on such cues to meaning, children—who are generally naïve to such pragmatic nuances—may diverge and access a broader range of interpretations or one disfavored by adults. A number of cases come to us from a now well-established body of research on scalar implicatures and scopal ambiguity. Here, we complement this previous work with a previously uninvestigated example of the semantic-pragmatic divide in language development arising from the interpretation of sentences with pluralities andtogether. Sentences such asTwo boys lifted a block (together)allow for either a Collective or a Distributive interpretation (one pushing event vs. two spatiotemporally coordinated events). We show experimentally that children allow both interpretations in sentences withtogether, whereas adults rule out the Distributive interpretation without further contextual motivation. However, children appear to be guided by their semantics in the readings they access, since they do not allow readings that are semantically barred. We argue that they are unaware of the pragmatic information adults have at their fingertips, such as the conversational implicatures arising from the presence of a modifier, the probability of its occurrence being used to signal a particular interpretation among a set of alternatives, and knowledge of the possible lexical alternatives.
