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The Interpretation of Disjunction in Universal GrammarMacquarie Centre for Cognitive Science, scrain{at}maccs.mq.edu.au Child and adult speakers of English have different ideas of what `or' means in ordinary statements of the form `A or B'. Even more far-reaching differences between children and adults are found in other languages. This tells us that young children do not learn what `or' means by watching how adults use `or'. An alternative is to suppose that children draw upon a priori knowledge of the meaning of `or'. This conclusion is reinforced by the observation that all languages adopt the same meaning of `or' in certain structures. For example, statements of the form `not S[A or B]' have the same meanings in all languages, and disjunctive statements receive a uniform interpretation in sentences that contain certain focus expressions, such as English `only'. These observations are relevant for the long-standing "nature versus nurture" controversy. A linguistic property that (a) emerges in child language without decisive evidence from experience, and (b) is common to all human languages, is a likely candidate for innate specification. Experience matters, of course. As child speakers grow up, they eventually learn to use `or' in the same way as adults do. But, based on findings from child language and cross-linguistic research, it looks like certain aspects of language, including the interpretation of disjunction, are part of the human genome.
Key Words: child language • cross-linguistic variation • disjunction • entailments • focus expressions • logical reasoning • positive and negative polarity • principles and parameters • Universal Grammar
Language and Speech, Vol. 51, No. 1-2,
151-169 (2008) |
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