O dystrybucji synonimicznych przyimków i operatorów adnumeratywnych

The article presents the results of questionnaire studies on the nominal – ad-verbal and post-prepositional – distribution of Polish prepositions and adnumeral operators of the form około ‘ a b o u t ’, od... do... ‘from... to...’, po ‘each’, and między ‘between’. These results demonstrate that adnominal operators około, od... do... and między are acceptable to various degrees, from the highly acceptable około, to the at best marginally accept-able między. They also confirm the existence of the distributive operator po, albeit limited to the positions of the subject and, perhaps, accusative object. Also the prepositions około, od... do..., and po are acceptable to various degrees and only in ad-verbal nominative, accusative and genitive positions.

Domain restriction in child Mandarin: Implications for quantifier spreading

This study explores Mandarin children’s competence with quantifier domain restriction. We present results from two experiments in which adults and four- to five-year old children evaluated two possible candidates for the domain selection associated with the distributive operator dou ‘all’ in Mandarin Chinese. In the first experiment, we investigated whether children and adults are capable of selecting an appropriate domain when two candidate NPs both appear inside dou’s quantification scope; i.e., both of the NPs c-command dou. In the second experiment, still two candidate NPs were presented, but one within dou’s scope and the other outside its scope. Our results indicate that four- to five-year-old children are capable of basic distributive computation associated with dou, but they may choose an NP that adults do not usually choose as the domain of dou, resulting in non-adult interpretations of distributive computation in certain cases. Based on the results, we propose that four- to five-year-old children are less certain about the domain restriction associated with dou-quantification. This proposal has important implications for the current debate on the acquisition of universal quantifiers, specifically, the problem of quantifier spreading. We explain children’s uncertainty about the domain restriction with a universal grammar-based statistical acquisition model.

The interpretation of singular nouns in the scope of an event-distributive quantifier

Singular nouns in the scope of a distributive operator have been shown to be treated as conceptually plural (Patson and Warren, 2010). The source of this conceptual plurality is not fully clear. In particular, it is not known whether the concept of plurality associated with a singular noun originates from distributing over multiple objects or multiple events. In the present experiment, iterative expressions (distribution over events) were contrasted with collective and distributive sentences using a Stroop-like interference technique (Berent, Pinker, Tzelgov, Bibi, and Goldfarb, 2005; Patson and Warren, 2010). A trend in the data suggests that event distributivity does not elicit a plural interpretation of a grammatically singular noun, however the results were not statistically significant. Possible causes of the non-significant results are discussed.