漢語兒童析取連詞和全稱量化的習得

Children’s Knowledge of Disjunction and Universal Quantification in Mandarin Chinese

向下蘊涵語境決定析取連詞的語義解讀。當析取連詞出現在全稱量詞的限定域（向下蘊涵語境）或核心轄域（非向下蘊涵語境）中時，其解讀在各語言中均存在著普遍非對稱性。本文旨在探索漢語兒童在包含全稱量詞“每＂的句子中，對析取連詞“或者＂的解讀。研究發現，當“或者＂出現在“每＂的限定域中時，兒童的解讀符合析取連詞在向下蘊涵語境中所指派的合取蘊涵關係；而當“或者＂出現在“每＂的核心轄域中時，兒童的解讀符合析取連詞在非向下蘊涵語境中所指派的析取真值條件。本文進一步證實：向下蘊涵是一種存在於各種語言並且出現於兒童語言發展早期階段的“核心＂語義屬性。

Downward entailing linguistic environments license inferences from sets to their subsets. These environments also determine the interpretation of disjunction: Disjunction licenses a conjunctive entailment in the scope of downward entailing operators (Crain 2008, 2012). This leads to a striking asymmetry across languages in the interpretation of disjunction when it appears in the restrictor (downward entailing) versus the nuclear scope (non-downward entailing) of the universal quantifier such as English every and Mandarin mei. The present study investigated Mandarin-speaking children’s interpretation of the disjunction word huozhe in sentences with the universal quantifier mei. The main findings were that young Mandarin-speaking children assigned the conjunctive entailment to huozhe when it appeared in the restrictor of mei. Moreover, they allowed the disjunctive truth conditions of huozhe in the nuclear scope of mei. Altogether, children’s asymmetric responses in the two arguments of mei suggest that Mandarin-speaking children, like adults, are aware of the semantic property of downward entailment at an early age. Along with previous cross-linguistic studies, the findings of the present paper provide further evidence for the view that the semantic ‘core’ property of downward entailment (a) applies in different linguistic communities, and (b) appears at an early stage of language development.