On the tri-ambiguous status of any : the view from child language

Lyn Shan Tieu

Research output: Chapter in Book / Conference PaperConference Paper

Abstract

![CDATA[This paper examines the monolingual acquisition of the English polaritysensitive item any, and uses evidence from child language acquisition to shed light on two questions that arise from the theoretical semantics literature. First, evidence from child spontaneous speech production is used to argue that children are grammatically conservative in their acquisition of negative polarity item (NPI) licensing. The same child data are then used to argue the following: (i) there is only one NPI any, subject to a disjunctive licensing condition; (ii) NPI any differs in some way from free choice (FC) any, resulting in the later emergence of FC any.]]
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of SALT 20: Proceedings of the 20th Semantics and Linguistic Theory Conference, Universityof British Columbia and Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, British Columbia, April 29 - May 1, 2010
PublisherCornell University
Pages19-37
Number of pages19
Publication statusPublished - 2010
EventConference on Semantics and Linguistic Theory -
Duration: 1 Jan 2016 → …

Conference

ConferenceConference on Semantics and Linguistic Theory
Period1/01/16 → …

Keywords

  • English language
  • language acquisition
  • semantics
  • children

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