Abstract
AbstractThe acquisition literature has documented several different types of misinterpretations of telic sentences by children, yet a comprehensive analysis of these child interpretations has not been attempted and a crosslinguistic perspective is lacking. This task is not easy, for, on the surface, children’s non-adultlike interpretations appear to be scattered and even contradictory across languages. Several cognitive biases have been proposed to explain given patterns (children initially adhere to a Manner bias, or alternatively a Result bias). Reviewing a wide range of studies on the acquisition of telic sentences in relation to tense-aspect markers, we show that children’s non-adultlike interpretations fall into three different patterns. We conclude that the diversity of non-adultlike interpretations that is found across child languages is incompatible with accounts that rely on these cognitive, language-independent principles, but instead is triggered by language-specific properties. Analyzing these patterns in detail, it appears that child learners across languages have problems with tense-aspect forms with variable meanings, in contrast to forms with a one-to-one form/meaning mappings which are acquired earlier. While adults use a context-sensitive interpretation of forms with multiple meanings, various semantic-pragmatic sources can explain children’s difficulties with interpreting such forms. All explanations that we identify across child languages rely on children’s immature command of pragmatic reasoning, albeit in very different ways for the three different patterns. Thus, by taking a crosslinguistic semantic approach and integrating detailed insights from the tense-aspect semantics of specific languages with universal pragmatic effects, we explain the non-adultlike interpretation of telic sentences in a variety of child languages in a comprehensive way.
Highlights
Understanding when a sentence describes an event with an inherent endpoint and when the endpoint has to be reached for the sentence to be true is a crucial step in the acquisition of sentence-level semantics.1 The acquisition literature has documented different types of misinterpretations of telic sentences by children, yet a comprehensive analysis of these child interpretations across languages is still lacking
We propose that children can overextend the imperfective use of the English simple past (SP) to perfective telic sentences because they have difficulty determining the exact restrictions bearing on its imperfective use, i.e., they fail to restrict this construal of the English SP in an adultlike way to stative predicates and generic/habitual sentences
The English predicates throw and wash entail a process when used in perfective sentences, but the result state can be denied without leading to a contradiction, which is typical for an implicature; see Talmy (1991), Beavers (2010) among others:17 (25) Fidelis threw the ball to Parana, but Jairzinho caught it before it could reach Parana
Summary
The third non-targetlike interpretation of telic sentences we focus on appears with what has been called in Thai and Chinese “implied-result verbs” (Thepkanjana and Uehara 2009), as opposed to “entailed-result verbs”. To summarize, Chen’s (2005, 2008, 2017) results suggest that Mandarin children tend to treat the result inference triggered by implied-result SVs under their perfective form as an entailment rather than an implicature These results support the One-to-Many Acquisition generalization: the form that raises problems for Mandarin learners is the form with more than one use, namely the implied-result SVs. In contrast, RVCs are invariably used to describe change (causative) situations, and, as expected, are acquired much more . Note the similarity with the learning pattern observed by Chen for child Mandarin: in both languages, learners tended to interpret the implied-result verbs as entailed-result verbs in perfective sentences. The experiments reported show that implied-result verbs in their perfective form tend to be interpreted as entailed-result verbs by learners of two quite different languages, namely Mandarin Chinese and English. The view we explore is that children’s tendency to strongly favor the causative use of these verbs reflects an immature command of the abductive reasoning underlying the non-literal, enriched, meaning of these implied-result statements by adults
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