Transcript ppt - UMass Amherst

Quantifier Spreading Is Not
Distributive
Thomas Roeper
Barbara Zurer Pearson
Margaret Grace
University of Massachusetts Amherst
[email protected]
BUCLD November 2010
Boston University
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
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“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
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Example (from DSLT*):
“Is every girl riding a bike?”
No, not this bike.
Copyright 2000 TPC
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Dialect Sensitive Language Test (Seymour, Roeper & de Villiers, 2000)
4
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?
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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?
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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
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Tunstall classic example:
[ waiter lifts tray of glasses]
=> he lifted every glass
=> *he lifted each glass
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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.
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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)
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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
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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
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(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
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 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
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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
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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 typicallydeveloping general American English speakers
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% of children giving repsonse type
Long trajectory -increases before it decreases
70
60
50
40
spreading
responses
30
target
20
10
0
4
5
6
7-8
9-10
11-12
age in years
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From Roeper et al. 2006
And doesn’t go away
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Every girl is riding a bike.
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.”
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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).
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Separating Distributivity
and Exhaustivity.
 A no distrib
not exhaustive
 B 1-1 distributive
not exhaustive
 C not 1-1 distrib
Exhaustive
(partial distrib?)
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Stimuli from Brooks et al. 2001
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(aside for “partial distributivity” – see S. Lima, 2010)
A
/
|
A
\
/
C
D
E
|
|
/
F
G
H
\
B
\
I
/
D
C
\
E
/
|
F
G
\
Partial distributivity
Partially distributive
under E, not one to one
because C has empty node
(non-exhaustive if any of the nodes are empty)
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Participants
Adults N = 40
Children = 38
 http://www.kwiksurvey
etc.
 Native English speakers
 Ages 20 to 71 (20+)
 Residence UK (6),
Canada (3) and U.S.
(31)




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Ages 5-9 (most 6-8)
Average 7;4
Grade K-3
Middle to lower
middle-class school
district in western MA
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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.
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Stimuli from Brooks et al. 2001
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(Add your intuitions)
 A version (of the adult survey)—is available at
http://www.kwiksurveys.com/online
survey.php?surveyID=OIHKG_7f21b1b7

(be entered in a raffle for a copy of Tom’s or my book)
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Adult preferences – Every flower is in a vase.
Every
1
0.8
0.6
0.4
0.2
0
All ok
Prefer A
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Prefer B
Prefer C
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Adult preferences – Each flower is in a vase.
Each
1
0.8
0.6
0.4
0.2
0
All OK
B Best
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only B
Rejects B
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Children’s Every
(with adult shaded as reference)
1
0.8
0.6
Adult
Child
0.4
0.2
0
All ok
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Prefer A
Prefer B
Prefer C
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Children’s Each
(with adult shaded as reference)
Adult
Child
1
0.8
0.6
0.4
0.2
0
All OK
B Best
only B
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Rejects
B
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(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)
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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)
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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)
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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)
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They did not like empty vases.
 Little concern for distributivity…..
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(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)
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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.
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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
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 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
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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
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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
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References

Brody, M. (1990). Some remarks on the focus field in Hungarian. UCL
Working Papers 2: 201-225.

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. 316-339. 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):
83-153.

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. 340-376. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Geurts, B. (2001). Quantifying kids. Ms., Humboldt University, Berlin and
University of Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
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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
1974. Appeared in Papers and reports on child language development
(1975), Stanford University, 63-74.

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. 97-128), University of
Massachusetts Occasional Papers UMOP, 34. Amherst, MA: GLSA.

Schulz, P. (2010). Presentation on wh- and exhaustive pairing. COST
meeting, London.
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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.
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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.
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Thank you.
Questions?
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Prizes: Prism of Grammar or RBC (english/spanish)
[email protected]
[email protected]
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 (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.)
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