Learning to suspend implicated contrast ; The acquisition of ook in Dutch
Abstract Children acquire the meaning of ook ‘also’ in Dutch relatively late ( Bergsma 2006 ), although this focus particle is highly frequent. We argue that this late acquisition is caused by a pragmatic rule: contrastive implicature. We follow Sæbø (2004) , who argues that additives are used because without them, the sentences they appear in would be interpreted as contrastive in relation to the context. Data from a sentence completion task administered to Dutch L1 learners ( N = 62, ages 4;0–5;11) show that, on average, four-year-olds do not distinguish sentences with ook from sentences wit... Mehr ...
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Dokumenttyp: | Artikel |
Erscheinungsdatum: | 2017 |
Reihe/Periodikum: | Linguistics in the Netherlands ; Linguistics in the Netherlands 2017 ; volume 34, page 143-155 ; ISSN 0929-7332 1569-9919 |
Verlag/Hrsg.: |
John Benjamins Publishing Company
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Schlagwörter: | Linguistics and Language / Language and Linguistics |
Sprache: | Englisch |
Permalink: | https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-27047332 |
Datenquelle: | BASE; Originalkatalog |
Powered By: | BASE |
Link(s) : | http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/avt.34.10wol |
Abstract Children acquire the meaning of ook ‘also’ in Dutch relatively late ( Bergsma 2006 ), although this focus particle is highly frequent. We argue that this late acquisition is caused by a pragmatic rule: contrastive implicature. We follow Sæbø (2004) , who argues that additives are used because without them, the sentences they appear in would be interpreted as contrastive in relation to the context. Data from a sentence completion task administered to Dutch L1 learners ( N = 62, ages 4;0–5;11) show that, on average, four-year-olds do not distinguish sentences with ook from sentences without ook . Five-year-olds do better on sentences with ook but worse on sentences without it. We argue that they have generally acquired contrastive implicature: they apply the correct contrastive interpretation to sentences without ook , but overgeneralize this implicature to sentences with ook , before completely acquiring the meaning of ook.