Article published In:
Linguistics in the Netherlands 2015Edited by Björn Köhnlein and Jenny Audring
[Linguistics in the Netherlands 32] 2015
► pp. 130–141
Edited by Björn Köhnlein and Jenny Audring
[Linguistics in the Netherlands 32] 2015
► pp. 130–141
Distributive, collective and “everything” in between
Interpretation of universal quantifiers in child and adult language
In this paper we studied the interpretation of sentences with the Dutch universal quantifiers alle (all) and elke (each) in collective, distributive and cumulative situations. In the first experiment, 25 adults and 30 children from 5 and 6 years old performed a truth-value judgement task. Adults and children show similar interpretations for collective and distributive, but perform different for cumulative. As a follow-up we performed a preference task. Participants gave their preferences for the three situations for both quantifiers. Children, regardless of the quantifier, prefer the distributive situation. Adults have a strong preference for distributive for elke, showing a wider range of interpretation for alle. These data clearly indicate that Dutch children do not yet have acquired the full range of restrictions for the quantifiers alle and elke.
Keywords: distributive, universal quantifiers, collective, cumulative, Dutch
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].
References (16)
Anderson, J. 1973. Universal quantifiers. Lingua 311.125–176 
Brooks, P. & M. Braine. 1996. What do children know about the universal quantifiers all and each? Cognition 601.235–268.
Brooks, P. & I. Sekerina. 2006. Shortcuts to quantifier interpretation in children and adults. Language Acquisition 131.177–206.
Drozd, Ken, Darinka Andjelkovi, Kristine Jensen de Lopez. et al. In Preparation. Children’s Processing of Universal Quantification: A Cross-linguistic Study.
Gil, D. 1982. “Quantifier Scope, Linguistic Variation, and Natural Language Semantics”. Linguistics and Philosophy 51.421–472.
Inhelder, Bärbel & Jean Piaget. 1964. The early growth of logic in the child, London: Routhledge.
loup, G. 1975. Some universals for quantifier scope. Syntax and Semantics 41.37–58.
Knezevic, Natasha. 2014. Distributivity and (inverse) scope. Presentation Workshop Nantes, University of Nantes. 23rd October, 2014.
Langacker, Ronald. 1991. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Stanford University Press. Stanford: California.
Musolino, J. 2009. The logical syntax of number words: Theory, acquisistion and processing. Cognition 1111.24–45
Roeper, T., U. Strauss & B. Pearson. 2006. The acquisition path of the determiner quantifier every: Two kinds of spreading. Current issues in first language acquisition 341.97–128.
Scha, Remko 1981. Distributive, collective and cumulative quantification. Formal Methods in the Study of Language ed. by J.A.G. Groenendijk, T.M.V. Janssen and M.B.J. Stokhof, 483–512. Amsterdam: Mathematisch Centrum.
Syrett, K. & J. Musolino. 2013. Collectivity, distributivity, and the interpretation of plural numerical expressions in child and adult language. Language Acquisition 201.259–291.
Tunstall, Susanne. 1998. The interpretation of quantifiers: semantics and processing. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts PhD Dissertation.
Van der Ziel, Marie-Elise. 2012. The Acquisition of Scope Interpretation in Dative Constructions: Explaining children’s non-targetlike performance. Utrecht: Utrecht University PhD dissertation.
Van Koert, Margreet, Aafke Hulk, Olaf Koeneman & Fred Weerman. 2015. How Dutch Children Preferably Interpret Elk and how English Children Preferably Understand Every. The Proceedings of the 39d Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development.
Cited by (4)
Cited by four other publications
de Koster, Anna M. B., Petra Hendriks & Jennifer K. Spenader
2021. Child-Like Adults: Dual-Task Effects on Collective vs. Distributive Sentence Interpretations. Frontiers in Psychology 12 
Bosnić, Ana, Jennifer Spenader & Hamida Demirdache
2020. Dancing monkeys in Serbian and Korean – exhaustivity requirements on distributive share markers. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 5:1
Shetreet, Einat & Rama Novogrodsky
2019. Differential Patterns of Children's Knowledge of Quantifier Meaning Revealed Under Different Tasks. Frontiers in Communication 4
Shetreet, Einat & Rama Novogrodsky
2020. Morphosyntactic Cues for Quantifier Comprehension in Children. Language Learning and Development 16:4 ► pp. 364 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 4 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.