Abstract
A striking cross-linguistic generalisation about the semantics of determiners is that they never express non-conservative relations. To account for this one might hypothesise that the mechanisms underlying human language acquisition are unsuited to non-conservative determiner meanings. We present experimental evidence that 4-and 5-year-olds fail to learn a novel non-conservative determiner but succeed in learning a comparable conservative determiner, consistent with the learnability hypothesis.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 315-334 |
Number of pages | 20 |
Journal | Journal of Semantics |
Volume | 30 |
Issue number | 3 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Aug 1 2013 |