Quantifier spreading: linguistic and pragmatic considerations

Abstract

This paper investigates the idiosyncratic understanding of universal quantifiers such as every, each, or all by English and Korean speaking children, and argues that the phenomenon of ‘quantifier spreading’ is explicable in terms of the maturation of both the cognitive system and the linguistic system. Evidence for this dual explanation comes from the fact that the visual input, a picture, plays a key role in determining the children's conceptual representation, suggesting the need for the central integration of visual and linguistic elements; and from the fact that a quantifier in the linguistic input has an intrinsic property, i.e. a 〈+focus〉 feature. From comparable experiments in four-to-seven year old English and Korean children, two major findings were observed: children's interpretation of quantifying items is affected by syntactic positional and structural cues of the quantifiers; and younger children at the ages of 4 and 5 performed significantly better than older children at the ages of 6 and 7. The former finding is explained by relating it to (universal) island effects determining extraction out of the predicate of a small clause, and the latter finding is claimed to give rise to the classic pattern of a U-shaped developmental curve. On the view that pragmatic considerations are mastered late in acquisition, later than syntactic knowledge, it is assumed that the high rate of spreading errors by older children can be attributed to the interference of pragmatic factors, rather than to lack of grammatical knowledge. It is therefore argued that at least three phases of learning are needed to master universal quantification: first, grammatical knowledge; then, the deployment of pragmatic considerations; and finally, the realisation that pragmatics cannot overrule syntax. The current experiments suggest that this mastery is not complete until after 7 years or so.