ДИСТРИБУЦИЈА ЗНАЧЕЊА КВАНТИФИКАТОРА НЕКИ У СРПСКОМ ЈЕЗИКУ: КОРПУСНА АНАЛИЗА

The paper analyzes the distribution of meanings of the quantifier neki 'some' in over 1500 utterances excerpted from the Serbian electronic corpus of early child language and the Corpus of contemporary Serbian language. The aim is to test the implicit Frequency Assumption of lexicalist approaches to scalar implicatures (SI), claiming that the use of the quantifier some often triggers SI: some = some, but not all. The analysis of proportions of meanings shows high dominance of different types of non-scalar meanings (existential, quantitative, spesumptive, exclamative). In child speech there are no instances of scalar meaning, whereas in the child directed speech they are extremely rare, which overall suggests that one of the possible reasons for the developmental asymmetry might be the low frequency of scalar meaning in the language input. In the written language of adults, a higher percentage of utterances bearing the potential to derive SIs is registered; however, scalar interpretation is strengthened by contextual factors.

Bilingual effects: Exploring object omission in pronominal languages

This article assesses the impact of bilingualism on the acquisition of pronominal direct objects in French and English (clitics in French and strong pronouns in English). We show that, in comparison to monolingual children, bilingual children omit more pronominal objects for a longer period in both languages. At the same time, the development in each language spoken by the bilinguals follows the developmental asymmetry found in the language of their monolingual counterparts: there are more omissions in French than in English. It is also shown that language dominance affects the rate of omissions as there are fewer omissions in the language in which children receive more exposure, i.e. the dominant language. We analyze these results as reflecting a bilingual effect based on the retention of a default null object representation. This in turn is supported by reduced overall input for bilingual children and by language-internal input ambiguity.