On the Quantificational Status of Indefinites: The View From Child Language

Theories of indefinites vary with respect to whether these noun phrases can be treated as quantificational. Although everyone seems to be in agreement that indefinites do not always introduce their own quantificational force, there is widespread disagreement as to whether they ever do. In this article, we present experimental evidence from children learning English and Kannada demonstrating that children's indefinites show scopal restrictions parallel to the restrictions they show with other unambiguously quantificational expressions. Children, unlike adults, show a strong preference to assign quantificational expressions surface scope. This is true for both strong and weak quantifiers, which would be surprising on a theory of indefinites that treated these expressions as uniformly nonquantificational. Consequently, we argue that in adult grammars indefinites must have a quantificational representation at least some of the time.

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