Distributive, collective and “everything” in between: Interpretation of universal quantifiers in child and adult language

Rouweler, Liset; Hollebrandse, Bart

doi:10.1075/avt.32.10rou

Article published In: Linguistics in the Netherlands 2015
Edited by Björn Köhnlein and Jenny Audring
[Linguistics in the Netherlands 32] 2015
► pp. 130–141

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Distributive, collective and “everything” in between

Interpretation of universal quantifiers in child and adult language

Liset Rouweler | University of Groningen

Bart Hollebrandse

Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 17 December 2015

https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.32.10rou

In this paper we studied the interpretation of sentences with the Dutch universal quantifiers alle (all) and elke (each) in collective, distributive and cumulative situations. In the first experiment, 25 adults and 30 children from 5 and 6 years old performed a truth-value judgement task. Adults and children show similar interpretations for collective and distributive, but perform different for cumulative. As a follow-up we performed a preference task. Participants gave their preferences for the three situations for both quantifiers. Children, regardless of the quantifier, prefer the distributive situation. Adults have a strong preference for distributive for elke, showing a wider range of interpretation for alle. These data clearly indicate that Dutch children do not yet have acquired the full range of restrictions for the quantifiers alle and elke.

Keywords: distributive, universal quantifiers, collective, cumulative, Dutch

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