Acquiring the many meanings of simple, negated and modal disjunction
This thesis addresses theoretical and developmental challenges raised by disjunction in simple affirmative sentences, under negation and under deontic possibility modals, in French-speaking children of age 4 to 8.
The first study of this thesis compares the performance in simple disjunctive statements with their negated counterpart within the same individuals and the same task. We show that the interpretation of disjunction, be it an adult-like reading or a non-adult-like one, is related across the two contexts. We build on Singh et al. (2016) to propose that children’s conjunctive reading in simple contexts and neither…nor reading in negated contexts can be both accounted with a unified analysis based on the grammatical approach to scalar implicatures.
By testing adults on negated disjunction with and without prosodic manipulations, our results revealed two populations of French speakers concerning the scope of disjunction with respect to negation, a conclusion which also holds for children. Finally, this thesis presents a novel experimental paradigm to examine modal disjunction. We showed that some children gave a modal conjunctive interpretation of the expected free choice reading. To account for behaviour, we proposed that some children insert a covert exhaustification operator locally into the syntactic structure. We further hypothesised that the local derivation of scalar implicatures is due to a preference to resolve ignorance inferences as early as possible.