S=?UTF-8?Q?=C3=A9minaire_?=LLF: Kriszta Szendroi, 12 mai 2014, 14h

[GEHRKE, BERIT]

L'UMR 7110 (LLF/Paris Diderot) a le plaisir de vous inviter à un exposé de


*Kriszta Szendroi* (University College London)


*Inverse scope by quantifier raising in adults and children*


Lundi, 12/05/14

14h-16h, salle 131

bât. Olympe de Gouges

8, place Paul Ricoeur

75013 Paris


This talk aims to contribute to our understanding of the grammatical
representation of quantifier scope in adults and children. The primary
focus will be on sentences with an existential subject and a universal
object, such as *A zookeeper feeds every giraffe*. This sentence is
ambiguous between a reading that involves a single zookeeper who feeds all
the giraffes (=overt scope), and a reading that involves potentially
different zookeepers for each giraffe (=inverse scope). English adults
rarely assign inverse scope to such sentences, and German adults almost
never do. In contrast, recent work indicates that 5-year old children
entertain *both* readings in an act out task in both languages (Szendroi
and Hoehle 2013). It is important that we understand the underlying reasons
for such a substantial, cross-linguistically validated discrepancy between
adults’ and children’s performance. My proposal is that inverse scope
*is *available
in the grammar of both adults and children, but for adults, it gets blocked
by alternative derivations with the same interpretation (Reinhart 2004). I
will bring independent evidence in favour of this position and evaluate the
pros and cons of such an explanation.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/parislinguists/attachments/20140429/f9939a89/attachment.htm>