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8 September 2000, DIP Colloquium, Bart Geurts

8 September 2000, DIP Colloquium
Title: Quantifying kids
Speaker: Bart Geurts, University of Nijmegen
Location: Philosophy Department, MFR ground floor
Date and Time: Friday 8th September 2000, 15.00-17.00

Abstract
It is well known that, at least in experimental settings, young children may deviate from their elders in their judgments about quantified sentences. This holds, in particular, for sentences with universal quantifiers. When asked if the sentence "Every A is paired with a B" is true or false, a child may claim that the sentence is:

  1. false in a situation like this: AB AB AB B
  2. true in a situation like this: AB AB AB A
  3. false in a situation like this: AB AB AB C

In this talk I will argue that these problems have two causes. On the one hand, children may have problems with non-symmetric determiners, which demand a syntax-semantics mapping that is more complex than the one required by symmetric determiners. On the other hand, younger children sometimes fail to grasp the restrictions grammatical form imposes on the domain of a determiner.

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