Linguistics / Communication Disorders Thomas Roeper Barbara Zurer Pearson Margaret Grace University of Massachusetts Amherst BUCLD November 2010 Boston University Quantifier Spreading Is Not Distributive

2 Linguistics/ Communication Disorders Plan of the talk  Brief definitions of spreading and distributive  Why spreading has been construed as distributive.  Our evidence that exhaustivity, not distributivity is at the root of children’s spreading with every, and even with each. Adult survey (baseline) Child survey  Our interpretation  Your questions and suggestions

3 Linguistics/ Communication Disorders “Classic Spreading” Quantifiers apply to both nouns: Is every girl riding a bike? = every girl rides (every) bike = and every bike is ridden by a girl

4 Linguistics/ Communication Disorders Example (from DSLT*) : “Is every girl riding a bike?” No, not this bike. Copyright 2000 TPC Dialect Sensitive Language Test (Seymour, Roeper & de Villiers, 2000)

5 Linguistics/ Communication Disorders Find spreading with other quantifiers:  Applies to all, some, and most Example some of the circles are red => some of the circles have (some) red (Matthei & Roeper, 1975; Philip, 1995) Also work by Drozd, Crain, Stickney, others Is it syntactic or semantic or both?

6 Linguistics/ Communication Disorders Is spreading distributive or exhaustive?  Does the quantifier really float?  The experiment confounds exhaustivity and distributivity  Exhaustivity = all bikes and all girls  Distributivity = one bike for each girl Can we pull these apart?

7 Linguistics/ Communication Disorders Lexical properties of quantifiers:  all = collective => all the water  every = collective or distributive Everyone surrounded the house = collective *every person surrounded the house  each = distributive and specific (presupposed set) Each elephant has two trunks [picture with two trunks] Does every elephant have two trunks? Each => defined set in situation Every => possibly generic

8 Linguistics/ Communication Disorders Tunstall classic example: [ waiter lifts tray of glasses] => he lifted every glass => *he lifted each glass

9 Linguistics/ Communication Disorders Acquisition challenge: 1.Children begin with early collective readings: “allgone milk” 2.Child must learn both exhaustive and distributive meaning Evidence of cognitive ability early with plurals (Avrutin & Thornton, 1994) 3.Child must associate distributivity with each.

10 Linguistics/ Communication Disorders Syntactic proposal ( Roeper Strauss & Pearson, 2006)  Every => syntactic Operator  Spreading = floated quantifier  Note: quantifier as higher operator argued for Hungarian (see Kang,1999; Brody, 1990)

11 Linguistics/ Communication Disorders Floating is lexically specific:  All the children are here  The children are all here  Each of the children are here  The children are each here  Every boy is here  *the boys are every here  Note: possible with jeder in German

12 Linguistics/ Communication Disorders Semantic alternative  Many Scandinavians won the Nobel Prize  => many Nobel Prize winners are Scandinavian (Drozd, 2001)  Semantic account:  Strong quantifiers (every, each, most) obey conservativity:  Q applies only to NP and requires truth of VP => No syntactic effects predicted

13 Linguistics/ Communication Disorders (semantic alternative – cont.  Weak Quantifiers (many):  involve Context variable (C) and a formula:  A = set of Scandinavians, B = set of nobel prizes and C =  set of contextually relevant Scandinavians many => Union of A,B where A,B > C = B  Conclusion: pragmatically conditioned

14 Linguistics/ Communication Disorders  Smits (2010), (see Stickney for most):  many parrots are wearing hats   True for: 4/5 parrots have hats  6/30 monkeys have hats Result: acquired later but with clear  pragmatic conditioning =/= spreading

15 Linguistics/ Communication Disorders Hypothesis  Children do not identify lexical properties correctly  Maybe All Q’s = exhaustive or distributive  Generalization: each = every = exhaustive every = each = distributive Child could go in either direction

16 Linguistics/ Communication Disorders Is spreading syntactic? Can we see the Q float?  Data from the DSLT (Seymour Roeper & de Villiers, 2000)  Pilot version of the DELV tests (Seymour, Roeper & de Villiers, 2003, 2005).  Piloted with 1458 children, African American English speakers, general American English speakers, typically developing, language impaired, ages 4 to 12.  The following graph is from 333 typically- developing general American English speakers

17 Linguistics/ Communication Disorders Long trajectory-increases before it decreases And doesn’t go away From Roeper et al. 2006

18 Linguistics/ Communication Disorders Looks like children are either--- Trying to distribute the girls to the bikes, and can’t if they don’t have enough girls—so they say “no, what about this bike?” Or they may just be thinking the “every” is telling them to attend to everything in the picture (and in the sentence)—to be exhaustive and so they say “no.” Every girl is riding a bike.

19 Linguistics/ Communication Disorders To tease apart explanations  Gave child 3 options for EVERY 1-1 Distributive/ NOT exhaustive Exhaustive/ not 1-1 distributive Collective/ NOT exhaustive  Tried to push toward distributivity, by giving an opportunity with EACH (lexically, strongly distributive).

20 Linguistics/ Communication Disorders Separating Distributivity and Exhaustivity.  A no distrib not exhaustive  B 1-1 distributive not exhaustive  C not 1-1 distrib Exhaustive (partial distrib?) Stimuli from Brooks et al. 2001

21 Linguistics/ Communication Disorders (aside for “partial distributivity” – see S. Lima, 2010) A / | \ C D E | | / \ F G H I Partial distributivity under E, not one to one A / \ B C / \ / | \ D E F G Partially distributive because C has empty node (non-exhaustive if any of the nodes are empty)

22 Linguistics/ Communication Disorders Participants Adults N = 40  etc.  Native English speakers  Ages 20 to 71 (20+)  Residence UK (6), Canada (3) and U.S. (31) Children = 38  Ages 5-9 (most 6-8)  Average 7;4  Grade K-3  Middle to lower middle-class school district in western MA

23 Linguistics/ Communication Disorders Ask, which pictures does this sentence describe? (could be 0, 1, any 2 of them, or all three)  Could it be any others?  Which is best?  Why?  and why not?  Every flower is in a vase.  Each flower is in a vase. Stimuli from Brooks et al. 2001

24 Linguistics/ Communication Disorders (Add your intuitions)  A version (of the adult survey)—is available at survey.php?surveyID=OIHKG_7f21b1b7  (be entered in a raffle for a copy of Tom’s or my book)

25 Linguistics/ Communication Disorders Adult preferences – Every flower is in a vase.

26 Linguistics/ Communication Disorders Adult preferences – Each flower is in a vase.

27 Linguistics/ Communication Disorders Children’s Every (with adult shaded as reference)

28 Linguistics/ Communication Disorders Children’s Each (with adult shaded as reference)

29 Linguistics/ Communication Disorders (only) 4 children focused on flowers for every  “All the flowers have vases that they’re in.” (5;4)  “There are empty vases, [clearly a concern] but where there are flowers, they are in a vase.” (8;1)

30 Linguistics/ Communication Disorders Most children focused on vases  [C], “the only one where vases are filled with flowers” (8;0)  “these two vases don’t have flowers” (6;2)  “not A or B, no flowers in those two vases” (7;8)  “no, two vases empty there” (6;5)  “no, the others have empty vases” (6;11) (7;4) (8;4)  “no, because some of the vases are empty” (7;9)  “not A, only one filled vase” (8;2)

31 Linguistics/ Communication Disorders Spontaneously SPREAD the quantifier to vases.  “[C], it’s the only one with flowers in every vase.” (9;4)  “Not B, there’s just one in each [vase]” (6;1)  “No, they don’t have flowers in all vases.” (9)  (for every flower in a vase), “could be 1 flower in each vase” (9)

32 Linguistics/ Communication Disorders SPREAD a quantifier to vases even with “each”  “looks like each flower is in each vase” (8;0)  “all vases are full” (8)  “flowers in all [vases]” (7;9)  “could be C, if there was just one flower in each, in all the vases” (7;1)  “one [flower] in each [vase]” (8;1)  “these two vases don’t have flowers” (6;2)  “not A or B, no flowers in those two vases” (7;8)  ??? Each flower has its own vase?

33 Linguistics/ Communication Disorders They did not like empty vases.  Little concern for distributivity…..

34 Linguistics/ Communication Disorders (only) 4 children described configuration of flowers, even for each  “B is a little better because it’s spread out” (8;1)  “B – each flower has its own vase.” (9;0)  “C has too many flowers; A they’re all in one” (6;5)  “Could be C if there was just one flower in each, in all the vases.” (7;1)  **(one appealed to config for every—”only C, all in same is wrong; 1 in 1 is wrong”) (7;7)

35 Linguistics/ Communication Disorders Each was clearly not distributive for the children  In fact, 14 children did not distinguish each and every (either gave same answer, or said “I already told you” when asked why about the second sentence)  To the extent that it’s confounded with every might be more likely exhaustive as well.

36 Linguistics/ Communication Disorders Acquisition Theory  Treat quantificational elements as Operators  Attach to the Root CP Negation: “I don’t want none’ Tense: “wented” “did lifted”, “had came” etc Plural: Does a dog have tails => dogs have tails

37 Linguistics/ Communication Disorders  Every, some, most, all  Wh- => who bought what Schulz (2010) who gave what to whom => 3 quantifiers no harder than 2  Cf. John didn’t buy anything anyhow anywhere

38 Linguistics/ Communication Disorders How do children eliminate quantifier spreading?  Roeper et al: they experience a second quantifier  As in:  Every dog has some hats [extra hat]  Prediction: children will stop spreading in these  cases earlier than in others

39 Linguistics/ Communication Disorders Conclusion:  1. Children take quantifiers to be exhaustive but not distributive initially 2. Each interpreted as exhaustive like every 3. Verbatim evidence supports the original claims of syntactic account of spreading 4. Weak quantification is a separate phenomenon  5. Operators are Default syntactic assumptions for children

40 Linguistics/ Communication Disorders References  Brody, M. (1990). Some remarks on the focus field in Hungarian. UCL Working Papers 2:  Brooks, P., Braine, M., Jia, G. & da Graca Dias (2001). Early representations of all, each and their counterparts in Mandarin Chinese and Portuguese. In Bowerman, M. and S. Levinson (eds.) Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development, p Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  Crain, S., Thornton, R., Boster, C., Conway, L., Lillo-Martin, D. & Woodams, E. (1996). “Quantification without qualification.” Language Acquisition, 5(2):  Drozd, K.F. (2001). Children’s weak interpretation of universally quantified sentences. In Bowerman, M. and S. Levinson (eds.) Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development, pp Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  Geurts, B. (2001). Quantifying kids. Ms., Humboldt University, Berlin and University of Nijmegen, Nijmegen.

41 Linguistics/ Communication Disorders References - 2  Kang, H.-K. (1999). Quantifier spreading by English and Korean children. Ms., University College, London.  Philip, W. (1995). Event quantification in the acquisition of universal quantification, Doctoral dissertation, UMass Amherst.  Roeper, T. &, E. (1974). “On the acquisition of some and all,” Presented at the Sixth Child Language Research Forum, Stanford University, April Appeared in Papers and reports on child language development (1975), Stanford University,  Roeper, T., Strauss, U., & Pearson, B. Z. (2006). The acquisition path of the determiner quantifier every: Two kinds of spreading. In T. Heizmann (Ed.), Papers in Language Acquisition (pp ), University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers UMOP, 34. Amherst, MA: GLSA.  Schulz, P. (2010). Presentation on wh- and exhaustive pairing. COST meeting, London.

42 Linguistics/ Communication Disorders References -3  Smits, E-J. (2010) Acquiring quantification:How children use semantics and pragmatics to constrict meaning. Dissertation Groningen, Holland.   Tunstall, S. (1998). The interpretation of quantifiers: Semantics and processing. Doctoral dissertation, University of Massachusetts Amherst.  Westerstahl, D. (1985). Determiners and context sets In J. van Bentham and A. ter-Meulen (Eds.), Generalized Quantifiers in Natural Language. Dordrecht: Foris Publications.

43 Linguistics/ Communication Disorders Acknowledgments  Some of the materials in the current experiment were assembled while Pearson was a visiting researcher at the ESRC in Bangor.  We want to thank Margaret Grace, who was helpful in adapting the adult survey for children, and administering it to them with me.

44 Linguistics/ Communication Disorders Thank you. Questions?

45 Linguistics/ Communication Disorders Prizes: Prism of Grammar or RBC (english/spanish)

46 Linguistics/ Communication Disorders  (Note also that Brooks et al., 2001, working on all and each in English, (and Mandarin, and Portuguese) say they found that the English learning children didn’t seem to “pay attention to the location of each” until around age 9.)