Conservativity and Learnability of DeterminersDownload PDFOpen Website

Published: 01 Jan 2013, Last Modified: 25 Sept 2023J. Semant. 2013Readers: Everyone
Abstract: A striking cross-linguistic generalisation about the semantics of determiners is that they never express non-conservative relations. To account for this one might hypothesise that the mechanisms underlying human language acquisition are unsuited to non-conservative determiner meanings. We present experimental evidence that 4- and 5-year-olds fail to learn a novel non-conservative determiner but succeed in learning a comparable conservative determiner, consistent with the learnability hypothesis.
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