Linguistics / Communication Disorders Thomas Roeper Barbara Zurer Pearson Margaret Grace University of Massachusetts Amherst [email protected]

Linguistics / Communication Disorders

Thomas RoeperBarbara Zurer Pearson

Margaret Grace

University of Massachusetts [email protected]

BUCLD November 2010Boston University

Quantifier Spreading Is Not Distributive

mailto:[email protected]

2Linguistics/ 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


“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


Example (from DSLT*): “Is every girl riding a bike?”

No, not this bike.

Copyright 2000 TPC

Dialect Sensitive Language Test (Seymour, Roeper & de Villiers, 2000)


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?


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?


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


Tunstall classic example:

[ waiter lifts tray of glasses]

=> he lifted every glass

=> *he lifted each glass


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.


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)


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


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


(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 Scandinaviansmany => Union of A,B where A,B > C = B

Conclusion: pragmatically conditioned


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


Hypothesis

Children do not identify lexical properties correctly

Maybe All Q’s = exhaustive or distributive

Generalization: each = every = exhaustive• every = each = distributiveChild could go in either direction


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 typically-developing general American English speakers


Long trajectory -increases before it decreases

4 5 6 7-8 9-10 11-12

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

spreading responsestarget

age in years

% o

f ch

ild

ren

giv

ing

re

pso

nse

ty

pe

And doesn’t go awayFrom Roeper et al. 2006


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.”

Every girl is riding a bike.


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).


Separating Distributivity and Exhaustivity.

A no distrib not exhaustive

B 1-1 distributivenot exhaustive

C not 1-1 distrib Exhaustive(partial distrib?)

A

B

C

Stimuli from Brooks et al. 2001


(aside for “partial distributivity” – see S. Lima, 2010)

A

/ | \

C D E

| | / \

F G H I

Partial distributivity

under E, not one to one

A

/ \

B C

/ \ / | \

D E F G

Partially distributive

because C has empty node(non-exhaustive if any of the nodes are empty)


Participants

Adults N = 40

http://www.kwiksurvey etc.

Native English speakers Ages 20 to 71 (20+) Residence UK (6),

Canada (3) and U.S. (31)

Children = 38

Ages 5-9 (most 6-8) Average 7;4 Grade K-3 Middle to lower

middle-class school district in western MA

http://www.kwiksurvey/


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.

A

B

C

Stimuli from Brooks et al. 2001


(Add your intuitions)

A version (of the adult survey)—is available athttp://www.kwiksurveys.com/online survey.php?surveyID=OIHKG_7f21b1b7

(be entered in a raffle for a copy of Tom’s or my book)

http://www.kwiksurveys.com/online-survey.php?surveyID=OIHKG_7f21b1b7




Adult preferences – Every flower is in a vase.

All ok Prefer A Prefer B Prefer C0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1

Every


Adult preferences – Each flower is in a vase.

All OK B Best only B Rejects B0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1

Each


Children’s Every (with adult shaded as reference)

All ok Prefer A Prefer B Prefer C0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1

AdultChild


Children’s Each (with adult shaded as reference)

All OK B Best only B Rejects B

0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1 AdultChild


(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)


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)


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)


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)

??? Each flower has its own vase?


They did not like empty vases.

Little concern for distributivity…..


(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)


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.


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


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


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


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


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.


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.


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.


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.


Thank you.

Questions?


Prizes: Prism of Grammar or RBC (english/spanish)

[email protected]@linguist.umass.edu

mailto:[email protected]


(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.)

Documents

Linguistics / Communication Disorders Thomas Roeper Barbara Zurer Pearson Margaret Grace University of Massachusetts Amherst [email protected]