In:Three Streams of Generative Language Acquisition Research: Selected papers from the 7th Meeting of Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition – North America, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Edited by Tania Ionin and Matthew Rispoli
[Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 63] 2019
► pp. 107–124
The interpretation of disjunction in VP ellipsis in Mandarin Chinese
Published online: 15 April 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.63.06gao
https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.63.06gao
This study investigated the interpretation assigned to disjunction by Mandarin-speaking children and adults in negative sentences with either overt or covert disjunction. In one condition, both negation and disjunction were phonologically realized in the second conjunct of a coordinate structure. In a second condition, disjunction was elided from the verb phrase. Children and adults differed in scope assignments when both negation and disjunction were phonologically realized. However, negation took scope over disjunction for both groups when disjunction was elided. The findings invite the inference that adults, but not children, analyze disjunction as a Positive Polarity Item in negative sentences, but this polarity sensitivity is cancelled in sentences with verb phrase ellipsis. In this linguistic structure, both groups assign the same interpretation.
Keywords: verb phrase ellipsis, disjunction, scope assignment, child Mandarin
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.The interpretation of disjunction in child and adult language
- 3.Verb Phrase (VP) ellipsis
- 4.The experiment
- 4.1Participants
- 4.2Procedures
- 5.Results
- 6.Discussion and conclusion
Acknowledgements Notes References
References (37)
(2015). A minimalist program for linguistic theory. In N. Chomsky (Ed.), The minimalist program (pp.153–199). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Crain, S. (2008). The interpretation of disjunction in universal grammar. Language and Speech, 51(1–2), 151–169.
Crain, S., & Philip, W. (1993). Global semantic dependencies in child language. Paper presented at the 16th GLOW Colloquium, Lund, Sweden.
Crain, S., Ni, W., & Conway, L. (1994). Learning, parsing, and modularity. In C. J. Clifton, L. Frazier, & K. Rayner (Eds.), Perspectives on sentence processing (pp.443–467). New York NY: Psychology Press.
Crain, S., & Thornton, R. (1998). Investigations in Universal Grammar –A guide to experiments on the acquisition of syntax. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Crain, S., Gardener, A., Gualmini, A., & Rabbin, B. (2002). Children’s command of negation. In Y. Otsu (Ed.), Proceedings of the 3rd Tokyo Conference on Psycholinguistics (pp.165–190). Tokyo: Hituzi Syobo.
Crain, S., & Thornton, R. (2015). 3rd year grammar. In A. Gallego, & D. Ott (Eds.), 50 years later (pp.71–84). Cambridge, MA: MIT Working Papers in Linguistics.
Crain, S., Koring, L., & Thornton, R. (2017). Language acquisition from a biolinguistic perspective. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 81, 1–30.
Geçkin, V., Crain, S., & Thornton, R. (2016). The interpretation of logical connectives in Turkish. Journal of Child Language, 43(4), 784–810.
Goro, T. (2004). The emergence of Universal Grammar in the emergence of language: The acquisition of Japanese logical connectives and positive polarity (Unpublished MA thesis). The University of Maryland.
(2007). Language-specific constraints on scope interpretation in first language acquisition (Unpublished PhD dissertation). The University of Maryland.
Goro, T., & Akiba, S. (2004a). The acquisition of disjunction and positive polarity in Japanese. In V. Chand, A. Kelleher, A. J. Rodriguez, & B. Schmeiser (Eds.), Proceedings of the 23rd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (pp.251–264). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
(2004b). Japanese disjunction and the acquisition of positive polarity. In Y. Otsu (Ed.), Proceedings of the 5th Tokyo Conference on Psycholinguistics (pp.137–162). Tokyo: Hituzi Shobo.
Goro, T. (in press). Negation uncertainty, and the Truth Value Judgment Task. In M. Nakayama, Y.-C. Su, & A. Huang (Eds.), Studies in Chinese and Japanese language acquisition: In honor of Stephen Crain (Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 60) (pp.12–29). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Gualmini, A., Crain, S., & Meroni, L. (2000). Acquisition of disjunction in conditional sentences. In C. Howell, S. Fish, & T. Keith-Lucas (Eds.), Proceedings of the 24th annual Boston University Conference on Language Deveopment (pp.367–378). Sommerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Guo, F., Foley, C., Chien, Y.-C., Chiang, C.-P., & Lust, B. C. (1996). Operator-variable binding in the initial state: A cross-linguistic study of VP ellipsis structures in Chinese and English. Cahiers de Linguistique- Asie Orientale, 25(1), 3–34.
Jayaseelan, K. A. (2001). Questions and question-word incorporating quantifiers in Malayalam. Syntax, 4(2), 63–93.
Jing, C.-Y., Crain, S., & Hsu, C.-F. (2005). The interpretation of focus in Chinese: child vs. adult language. In Y. Otsu (Ed.), Proceedings of the 6th Tokyo Conference on Psycholinguistics (pp.165–179). Tokyo: Hituzi Syobo.
Klima, E. (1964). Negation in English. In J. A. Fodor & J. J. Katz (Eds.), The structure of language: Readings in the philosophy of language. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Lee, O.-S. (2010). Acquisition of Korean disjunction under negation. Working Papers in Linguistics, Department of Linguistics, University of Hawai'i at Mãnoa, 41(7), 1–12.
Morris, B. J. (2008). Logically speaking: Evidence for item-based acquisition of the connectives AND & OR. Journal of Cognition and Development, 9, 67–88.
Pietroski, P., & Crain, S. (2012). The language faculty. In E. Margolis, R. Samuels, & S. P. Stich (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of philosophy and cognitive science (pp.361–381). Oxford: OUP.
Spector, B. (2014). Global positive polarity items and obligatory exhaustivity. Semantics and Pragmatics, 7, 1–61.
Syrett, K., & Lidz, J. (2011). Competence, performance, and locality of quantifier raising: Evidence from 4-year-old children. Linguistic Inquiry, 42, 305–337.
Szabolcsi, A. (2002). Hungarian disjunctions and positive polarity. In I. Kenesei & P. Siptar (Eds.), Approaches to Hungarian (Vol. 8). Szeged: University of Szeged.
(2004). Positive polarity-negative polarity. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 22(2), 409–452.
Thornton, R., & Wexler, K. (1999). Principle B, VP ellipsis, and interpretation in child grammar. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Tieu, L., Romoli, J., Zhou, P., & Crain, S. (2016). Children’s knowledge of free choice inferences and scalar implicatures. Journal of Semantics, 33(2), 269–298.
(2003). Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 25 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.