Each

Camille Hanlon cchan at conncoll.edu
Mon Mar 24 17:07:19 UTC 2003


Dear Info-childes,

This note is in response to Tom Roeper's inquiry about work on each.  I
have responded directly to Tom, but it occurred to me that my message
might also be of more general interest to the group.  Some years ago I
published a study of the acquisition of a group of English quantifiers
that I called set-relational quantifiers.  This group includes the terms
all, some, no, none, each, every, any, another, other,both, either, and
neither , as they are used to quantify nominals.  Subsequently I used
the conceptual model constructed to predict the developmental sequence
for American English speakers to do a comparative study of seven modern
Indo-European languages and classical Greek and Latin. The empirical
data were provided by  native informants, except, of course, for
classical Greek and Latin, where I had to make do with a classicist
colleague.  The results of these studies are reported in the following
papers:

Hanlon, Camille.  (1987).  Acquisition of set-relational quantifiers in
early childhood.  Genetic, Social, and General Psycholgy Monographs,
113, (2), 213-264.  (Genetic is the older term for
Developmental and has no biological implication in this usage.)

Hanlon, Camille, & Silverberg, Joann.  (1998).  Semantic and pragmatic
aspects of set-relational reference in modern Indo-European languages.
Pragmatics, 8, 543-554.

The conceptual structures necessary to fully control this semantic
domain in everyday reference form a highly elaborated, multi-layered
system, a magnificent testament to the human (higher primate?) mind.
Reading through relevant transcripts of caregiver-child conversation
gave me a lot of clues as to how these structures could be constructed,
but before I finished the job, it was time to retire.  Now its your turn
to ask the questions and find the answers.  Enjoy!

Best wishes for a just and lasting peace everywhere,

Camille Hanlon

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