Acquisition of the Scope Interaction between Numeral Quantifiers and Negation in Korean

Hye-Young Kwak, Linguistics

This study explores the scope interaction between numeral quantifiers and negation in Korean, as exemplified in the following sentence:

Piglet-i chayk-ul twu-kwen an ilk-ess-e.

Piglet-Nom book-Ac two-CL NEG read-PST-E

‘Piglet didn’t read two books.’

    The sentence is scopally ambiguous in that the quantifier wide scope meaning (isomorphic interpretation) is ‘there are two books that Piglet didn’t read,’ while the negation wide scope meaning (non-isomorphic interpretation) is ‘it is not the case that Piglet read two books.’

    Twenty-nine Korean-speaking children aged four to five and a control group of twenty-six native Korean speakers participated in the production experiment, which involved an elicited production task. Each participant was given illustrated stories for two contexts, each of which targeted one of the meanings described above. At the end of each story, an experimenter asked a puppet to describe what happened in the story, and the participants identified and corrected any statements that were incorrect. The children and the control group produced few negative sentences containing numerally quantified NPs, preferring instead to use corresponding affirmative sentences.    

    The same subjects participated with a control group of fourteen adults in the comprehension experiment, involving a Truth-Value Judgment Task. Each participant was presented with illustrated stories and judged the truth of a potentially ambiguous statement (containing a quantifier and a negative). Both the children and the control group tended to give judgments consistent with isomorphic interpretations of the test sentences, although the control group selected non-isomorphic interpretations more frequently than the children.

    I discuss several factors that might have contributed to these results, including pragmatic aspects, processing, and distributional patterns of numeral quantifiers and negation in the input.