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Anna Verbuk
459-470 (complete pdf)
An experiment on the acquisition of regular Principle B contexts and Exceptional Coreference contexts forcing the coreference reading by English-speaking children is presented. The author maintains that binding is determined by the syntax and adopts Levinson's (2000) implicatures-based account of disjoint reference and coreference. It is further argued that Levinson's account needs to be supplemented with a Discourse Condition on Exceptional Coreference Contexts that requires the presence of an Open Proposition. The main experimental finding was that children went through a non-adult stage where they did well on regular Principle B contexts and misinterpreted Exceptional Coreference Contexts as regular Principle B contexts. This result was predicted on the author's account, but not on Thornton and Wexler's (1999) or Reinhart's (2004) accounts of the Principle B lag. Children's poor performance on interpreting Exceptional Coreference Contexts is attributed to their pragmatic difficulty with computing Open Propositions.
Published in:
Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition North America (GALANA)
edited by Alyona Belikova, Luisa Meroni, and Mari Umeda
Table of contents
ISBN 978-1-57473-419-5 library binding
vii + 490 pages
publication date: 2007
published by Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA, USA