The development of presupposition: Pre-schoolers' understanding of regret and too

Little is known about presuppositional skills in pre-school years. Developmental research has mostly focused on children’s understanding of too and evidence is mixed: some studies show that the comprehension of too is not adult-like at least until school age, while more recent findings suggest that even pre-schoolers can interpret too-sentences in more age-appropriate tasks. Importantly, no study has tested directly, within the same experiment, pre-schoolers’ presupposition understanding in satisfaction versus accommodation, nor with respect to other trigger types. Yet, it is well known that adults’ processing of a presupposition is costlier when accommodation is required and that the type of trigger influences the processing demands. Therefore, both the trigger type and the contextual availability of a presupposition might influence young children’s comprehension. We tested this with a story completion task that assessed 3–5-year-olds’ comprehension of presuppositions activated by either regret or too in contexts that either satisfied the presupposition or required accommodation. Results reveal that pre-schoolers overall exhibit an understanding of presupposition. Crucially, this starkly improves between the age of 3 and 5 and the developmental trajectory depends on both context and trigger type: understanding the presupposition of regret seems easier than that of too for younger children, and less difficulties emerge when the context satisfies the presupposition. Thus, the development of presupposition comprehension in pre-schoolers depends both on the type of trigger and the contextual availability of the presupposition – satisfied versus requiring failure repair

Some Pieces Are Missing: Implicature Production in Children

Until at least 4 years of age, children, unlike adults, interpret some as compatible with all. The inability to draw the pragmatic inference leading to interpret some as not all, could be taken to indicate a delay in pragmatic abilities, despite evidence of other early pragmatic skills. However, little is known about how the production of these implicature develops. We conducted a corpus study on early production and perception of the scalar term some in British English. Children's utterances containing some were extracted from the dense corpora of five children aged 2;00 to 5;01 (N = 5,276), and analysed alongside a portion of their caregivers' utterances with some (N = 9,030). These were coded into structural and contextual categories allowing for judgments on the probability of a scalar implicature being intended. The findings indicate that children begin producing and interpreting implicatures in a pragmatic way during their third year of life, shortly after they first produce some. Their production of some implicatures is low but matches their parents' input in frequency. Interestingly, the mothers' production of implicatures also increases as a function of the children's age. The data suggest that as soon as they acquire some, children are fully competent in its production and mirror adult production. The contrast between the very early implicature production we find and the relatively late implicature comprehension established in the literature calls for an explanation; possibly in terms of the processing cost of implicature derivation. Additionally, some is multifaceted, and thus, implicatures are infrequent, and structurally and contextually constrained in both populations

Free choice for all: a response to Emmanuel Chemla

Chemla (2009) presents experimental data purporting to show that speakers’ intuitions about so-called “embedded implicatures” cause trouble for globalist and localist theories alike. We explain, to begin with, that the way Chemla frames the debate between localists and globalists fails to do justice to the latter. Then we turn to his experimental data, and argue that, while of half of them strengthen our own case against localism (Geurts & Pouscoulous 2009), the other half do not jeopardize the globalist view, as Chemla claims they do. doi:10.3765/sp.2.5 <a href="http://semantics-online.org/sp-bib/geurts-pouscoulous-on-chemla.bib">BibTeX info</a

'The moustache' returns: referential metonymy acquisition in adult learners of English as an additional language (EAL)

abstract Referential metonymy, e.g. ‘ the moustache (= man with a moustache) sits down first’, appears early in L1 acquisition (Falkum, Recasens &amp; Clark, 2017). Yet how does it emerge in pragmatically mature but linguistically developing adult L2 learners? We used one comprehension and two production tasks, based on Falkum and colleagues (2017), to investigate metonymy abilities in 34 Japanese adult learners of English as an additional language (EAL) and a control group of 31 native English speakers. We also examined how time constraints and exposure to examples of referential metonymy affected production. In the comprehension task, both EAL-learner and native-speaker participants chose metonymic readings at above chance levels. In both production tasks, all participants produced innovative metonyms. Additionally, the findings indicate that, in L2, exposure to examples dramatically increases metonymy production, while time pressure decreases it. The results suggest that participants can both comprehend and produce novel metonyms in L2, with a possible explicitness vs. production costs trade-off

Une pragmatique sans implicatures? Approches lexicales du vouloir dire dans la philosophie médiévale

International audienceCet article examine les raisons pour lesquelles on ne trouve pas vraiment, en philosophie médiévale, un équivalent de la notion gricéenne d'implicature, en dépit de l'intérêt marqué des auteurs pour la distinction entre sens propre et sens visé par les locuteurs. Cela est avant tout dû à une approche médiévale de cette distinction qui s’attache à réduire les phénomènes traités à des combinaisons propriétés sémantiques au niveau lexical. Appliqué à certains des phénomènes que Grice considérait relever de l’implicature, ce modèle rapproche les médiévaux des positions ‘lexicalistes’ en pragmatique contemporaine. Il s’en distingue toutefois par le peu d’intérêt que nos auteurs médiévaux accordent aux formes d’implicite qui ne sont pas réductibles à des changements sémantiques au niveau des mots. En ce sens, la sémantique médiévale est une sémantique de l’explicite