ABSTRACT

A locus of the difference in meaning between distributive and collective sentences can be the quantifiers that modify their subjects. A current theoretical account of distributive and collective sentences claims that sentences with quantifiers such as the in English, or los in Spanish, in subject position and an indefinite direct object, modified by a in English, or una in Spanish, are ambiguous as to whether they are distributive or collective, all things being equal. In contrast, the same sentences with each/cada in subject position are unambiguously distributive. This account claims that sentences with quantifiers such as the/los in subject position come to be interpreted collectively, and not distributively, because the distributive meaning could more informatively be constructed using the unambiguous each/cada quantifier. This is the same neo-Gricean reasoning that accounts for the Quantity Implicature that arises for some, given the informativeness of all. On this account, collective and distributive interpretations are intrinsically linked, which predicts that even children’s non-adult-like collective and distributive interpretations should nonetheless be statistically associated, which we confirm in a sample of Puerto Rican Spanish-speaking children. We further propose that growth occurs both internal to lexical items, in terms of denotative content, as well as externally, within the lexicon in quantifier networks. Such networks have traditionally been expressed in formal semantics as pragmatic scales. We claim that the growth of both of these lexical dimensions are indexed by general lexical growth and show that a statistical association obtains between them in our sample.

摘要

分布句子和集体句子之间的意义差异的根源可以是修饰其主语的量词。电流理论帐户分配和集体句子权利要求中的，与量词句子如在英语，或洛斯在西班牙语中，在被摄体的位置和无限期直接对象，通过修饰一个英语，或UNA在西班牙语中，不明确是否它们是分布的或集体的，万物都是平等的。相比之下，每个主题都具有相同句子的句子无疑是分布性的。此帐户声称带有// los等量词的句子主题位置中的“名词”将被集体地而不是分布式地解释，因为可以使用明确的每个/加拿大量词来更有意义地构建分布意义。考虑到所有人的信息量，这与解释某些人出现的数量隐含性的新哥伦布推理相同。因此，集体解释和分配解释在本质上是相互联系的，这预示着即使是儿童的非成人式的集体解释和分配解释也应在统计上相关联，我们在波多黎各说西班牙语的儿童样本中证实了这一点。我们进一步提出，从符号内容的角度来看，增长既发生在词汇项的内部，也发生在量词网络中的词汇表的外部。传统上，此类网络已以形式语义表述为实用规模。我们声称这两个词法维度的增长都由一般词法增长来索引，并表明在我们的样本中它们之间获得了统计关联。