Linguistic and Cognitive Aspects of Quantification

This volume presents the results of psycholinguistic research into various aspects of the grammar of quantification. The investigations involve children and adults, speakers of different languages, using a variety of experimental paradigms. A shared aspect of the studies is that they present their experimental results as evidence evaluating linguistic theories of quantification. Topics discussed include the interpretation of universal, comparative, and superlative quantifiers, quantifier spreading, scope interaction between pairs of quantifiers and between quantifiers and wh-phrases, distributivity and cumulativity, the interaction of quantifier interpretation with information structure, the disambiguating role of prosody, the functional overlap between universal quantification and perfectivity, and much more. The focus on experimental evidence makes this book essential reading for linguists (syntacticians, semanticists and pragmatists), psycholinguists and psychologists interested in quantification.

Provides experimental evidence for various, often competing, linguistic theories of quantification Discusses the major research topics subjected to experimental study in the field of quantification Illustrates the different methodological tools applicable in the experimental study of quantification

Inhalt
Introduction; Katalin É. Kiss.- Structural asymmetry in question/quantifier interactions; Asya Achimova, Viviane Déprez, and Julien Musolino.- Children know the prosody-semantic/pragmatic link: Experimental evidence from Rise-Fall-Rise and scope; Ayaka Sugawara, Martin Hackl, Irina Onoprienko, and Ken Wexler.- Differentiating universal quantification from perfectivity: Cantonese-speaking children's command of the affixal quantifier saai3; Margaret Ka-yan Lei and Thomas Hun-tak Lee.- Scalar implicature or domain restriction: How children determine the domain of numerical quantifiers; Katalin É. Kiss and Tamás Zétényi.- Universal quantification and distributive marking in Serbian; Natasa Knezevic and Hamida Demirdache.- The distributivecollective ambiguity and Information Structure; Balázs Surányi and Levente Madarász.- Quantifier Spreading in school-age children: An eye-tracking study; Irina A. Sekerina, Patricia J. Brooks, Luca Campanelli, and Anna M.Schwartz.- Turning adults into children: Evidence for resource-based accounts of errors with universal quantification; Oliver Bott and Fabian Schlotterbeck.- Subject index.