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http://hdl.handle.net/1903/3785
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| Title: | Everyone Knows, Therefore Every Child Knows: An Investigation of Logico-semantic Competence in Child Language |
| Authors: | Minai, Utako |
| Advisors: | Lidz, Jeffrey L.
Pietroski, Paul M. |
| Department/Program: | Linguistics |
| Type: | Dissertation |
| Sponsors: | Digital Repository at the University of Maryland
University of Maryland (College Park, Md.) |
| Keywords: | Language, Linguistics (0290)
acquisition, semantic competence, entailment, inference, universal quantifier |
| Issue Date: | 14-Jul-2006 |
| Abstract: | This dissertation discusses children's understanding of semantic contribution of the universal quantifier every and its interactions with negation from a logico-semantic perspective. The universal quantifier every evokes an asymmetric entailment pattern in its first and second arguments (e.g., Ladusaw, 1979), which influences both sentential meanings and inferential relations among them. Whereas several studies have revealed children's sophisticated ability to compose the meanings of sentences containing every (e.g., Gualmini 2005), far less is known about whether children's knowledge about every can be extended to the level of meaning comparison, i.e., to the computation of the inferential relations among every-sentences. We thus investigate whether children are able to apply their knowledge about every to the calculation of the inference relations between every-sentences. In particular, this dissertation aims to experimentally examine children's ability to evaluate the inferences bet... |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/1903/3785 |
| Appears in Collections: | Linguistics Theses and Dissertations
UM Theses and Dissertations
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| umi-umd-3626.pdf | | 5676Kb | Adobe PDF | 314 | View/Open |
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