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In:Semantics in Language Acquisition
Edited by Kristen Syrett and Sudha Arunachalam
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 24] 2018
► pp. 275–298

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Chapter 12
Overt, covert, and clandestine operations

Ambiguity and ellipsis in acquisition

 | Rutgers University
Published online: 2 August 2018
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.24.12syr
Abstract
One of the major challenges on the path to becoming an adult speaker arises from ambiguous sentences – sentences that are in principle compatible with multiple interpretations. In this chapter, I review experimental evidence from a series of studies run with children age four to six years, focusing on three cases of sentential ambiguity. The first is the case of ambiguity of question-answer relations arising from the interaction of wh-phrases and universal quantifiers. The second is ambiguity resulting from covert movement of a quantificational phrase yielding different interpretations of verb phrase ellipsis. The third is the interpretation of comparative constructions involving pronominal reference. In each instance, a successful interpretation depends on one or more successful abstract syntactic-semantic operations, for which the child must deploy special forces. But as history tells us with such operations outside of the grammar, not every operation is a success, and failures (in this case, retrieval of a non-target interpretation, or the generation of interpretations beyond the target one), can either indicate the child’s developing linguistic capacity or the extent to which the range of possibilities presented by the adult grammar may have been underestimated.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Terminological background and selected case studies
    • 2.1Overt operation
    • 2.2Covert operation
    • 2.3Clandestine operation
    • 2.4Three case studies
  • 3.Case 1: Questions involving wh-phrases and universal quantifiers
    • 3.1Theoretical background
    • 3.2Evidence from child language acquisition
  • 4.Case 2: Embedded antecedent-contained deletion (ACD)
    • 4.1Theoretical background
    • 4.2Evidence from child language acquisition
  • 5.Case 3: Pronominal reference in comparatives
    • 5.1Theoretical background
    • 5.2Evidence from child language acquisition
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (52)
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